A  WOMAN'S  HEART 


A  Woman's  Heart 

Manuscripts 

Found  in  the  Papers  of  Katherine 

Peshconet  and  Edited  by  her 

Executor 

OLIVE   RANSOM 


"Rede  me  and  be  notl  wrothe 
For  I  saye  no  thynge  but  fro  the. 


New  York 

Doubleday,  Page  &  Company 
1906 


Copyright,  1906,  by 

Doubleday,  Page  &  Company 

Published,  April,  1906 

All  rights  reserved, 

Including  that  of  translation  into  foreign  languages, 
including  the  Scandinavian 


(L|)ic  fcoofc  is  t 

To  the  Memory  of 

KATHERINE  PESHCONET 

And  to  the  Memory  of 
All  Women  of  like  Histories 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 


I. 


But  I  must  utter  what  the  voice  within 
Dictates,  for  acquiescence  dumb  were  sin. 

JAMES  RUSSELL,  LOWELL. 

WELL,  I  love  you.  I  am  not  ashamed  to 
say  it.  And  you  shall  lead  a  better  and 
broader  life  with  me. 

If  you  had  not  been  hemmed  in  by 
the  metaphysics  of  the  schoolmen,  by 
fastings,  prayers  and  offices,  would  you 
have  just  that  naivete  and  abounding 
faith  that  whatever  is  is  right? 

How  different  my  worship!  As  the 
years  passed  to  my  majority  ever  think- 
ing with  a  glow  in  heart,  "  So  much  larger 
in  knowledge!  So  much  nearer  work!'* 
Always  prostrate  before  knowing;  tor- 
[1] 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 

luring  my  soul  because  of  slow  gains  in 
learning;  palpitating  and  quivering  with- 
in the  penetralia  of  my  ideals.  I,  too, 
had  fasts  and  vigils. 

And  now  you  say  this  missal  and 
breviary  hold  all — I  have  nothing  more 
to  seek — only  to  be  lowly  of  soul  and  ob- 
servant of  what  priests  teach — oh,  yes, 
the  phrase  is  "what  the  church — the  holy 
church — teaches,"  I  had  for  the  moment 
forgotten.  You  advise  me  to  pour  the 
eleventh  century  wine  of  these  books  into 
the  twentieth  century  bottle  of  my  brain. 

You  are  not  good  and  you  have  not 
faith  enough?  Ah,  if  you  were  not  and 
had  not  you  would  drop  your  belief  in 
self-assumed  authority.  You  will  not? 
What  hold  it  has  on  you!  How  can  you 
subject  yourself  to  the  dictum  of  those 
desiccated  monks  and  bishops?  Such 
abnegation  of  desires  and  personality  is 
servile.  To  walk  without  a  cane  or 
crutch — that  is  to  be  strong. 

But  suppose  I   admit  your  doctrines 

and  cry  "Credo."     What  then?     You 

[2] 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

are  the  farther  away.  I  of  your  faith? 
Then  you  are  more  than  ever  remote 
from  me,  no  longer  the  one  of  all  the 
world  it  is  a  delight  to  be  near,  but  a  con- 
secrated priest — of  a  sacerdotal  caste.  It 
would  be  a  sin,  instead  of  the  wine  of  life, 
to  love  you. 

The  council  of  Trent  more  than  three 
hundred  years  before  you  were  born  for- 
bade you  to  marry.  Because  you  could 
perform  your  parochial  duties  better  if  I 
were  to  help  you  ?  Every  good  man  has 
more  than  double  strength  when  rightly 
aided  by  a  good  woman — every  good 
woman  more  than  double  strength  when 
rightly  aided  by  a  good  man.  We  should 
be  strong  together. 

God  was  before  the  council  of  Trent, 
dear  heart.  When  he  bade  you  love  me, 
he  bade  you  marry  me.  You  yourself 
acknowledge  there  are  abuses  in  your 
church.  You  will  not  sacrifice  your  life 
to  one  of  the  greatest — that  would  be 
cowardly. 

[3] 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 

But  given  things  as  they  are,  might  I 
not  buy  you  off?  My  having  you,  you 
see,  is  all  a  matter  of  gold.  For  payment 
of  money  other  popes  have  released  from 
vows  other  priests  and  even  bishops. 
Talleyrand  of  Autun,  you  know,  mar- 
ried after  years  of  a  life  that  had  never 
been  blessed  by  the  clergy.  Why  not  a 
similar  concession  nowadays  ? — even  if 
you  have  not  entered  Talleyrand's  ves- 
tibulum  to  the  married  state.  His  price 
upon  you  would  be  high,  if  the  pope  knew 
half  your  worth. 

I  shall  lead  you  away.  What  if 
the  archbishop  does  thunder? — and  the 
pope?  What  then?  They  will  not  let 
you  do  as  God  directs.  We  will  issue  our 
own  writ  of  independence.  We  are  Amer- 
icans— you  at  least  in  birth  if  not  in 
spirit  and  tradition.  We  will  make  our 
own  church,  which  self-cleans  itself  from 
abuses,  and  in  which  God  alone  reigns. 
How  serene  our  days  after  this  nervous 
strain!  I  shall  convert  you.  Soon  you 
will  not  believe  in  their  conjuring  power, 
[4] 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

and  you  will  smile  at  their  anathemata,  as 
the  great  world  smiles  and  still  whirls  on. 
With  Shelley  you  will  say : 

"How  ludicrous  the  priest's  dogmatic  roar! 
The  weight  of  his  exterminating  curse 
How  light !  and  his  affected  charity, 
To  suit  the  pressure  of  the  changing  times, 
What  palpable  deceit!" 

But  you  do  believe  in  them  ?  No,  not 
believe — you  mean.  You  cannot  say  you 
believe — believe,  for  instance,  as  you  be- 
lieve the  sun  is  shining  over  there  on 
the  lawn.  You  cannot  say  that,  dearest. 
You  mean  you  can  not  believe  in 
their  self-constituted  authority  and  power. 
Take  the  myth  of  the  apostolic  succes- 
sion. It  is  easy  to  show  that  bishops  or 
presbyters  of  the  early  church  were  in 
many  cases  installed  by  the  laity,  and  that 
their  later  confreres  accepted  ordination 
in  like  manner.  That  ends  the  whole 
papal  pretence.  You  can  prove  the  op- 
posite, also  ?  Even  if  you  can,  the  claim 
of  the  bishop  of  Rome  is  beset  with 
doubts. 

[51 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

I  know  nothing  of  the  church's  doc- 
trines and  its  theology  ?  Teach  me,  then. 
You  have  said  the  doctrines  are  in  the 
creed.  And  what  is  theology — Christian 
theology?  No  more  than  men's  specula- 
tion built  upon  the  simple  sayings  of  Je- 
sus. In  it  are  submerging  depths  of  hu- 
man narrowness  and  human  unsympathy. 
I,  too,  can  speculate,  for  have  I  not  also 
the  sayings  of  Jesus  ?  What  do  I  want, 
except  as  the  expression  of  a  pious  soul 
long  ago  foredone,  or  for  their  evolution- 
ary values,  of  Augustine's  opinions  ?  Over 
him  I  have  the  advantage  of  fifteen 
centuries  of  our  human  race's  growth 
in  knowledge  and  wisdom.  Jerome,  Bona- 
ventura — they  were  doubtless  good  men 
and  lived  up  to  the  best  of  their  times. 
Let  us  live  up  to  the  best  of  ours. 

"Truth  is  truth  at  all  times,"  you  say. 
That  is  just  what  I  claim — absolute  truth 
is.  But  there  is  theological  truth — rela- 
tive truth,  and  truth  only  so  far  as  their 
human  sympathy  and  science  lighted  the 
theologues  who  pronounced  it.  Go  into  a 
[6] 


A   WOMAN'S  HEART 

second-hand  bookstore;  take  down  any 
old  theological  tome.  How  antiquated 
its  teachings.  How  absurd  its  pronuncia- 
mentoes!  As  antediluvian  as  Noah's 
boat. 

But  still  further  regarding  the  divinity 
of  Jesus — is  not  his  loftiness  and  beauty 
of  soul  the  greater  if  we  look  upon  him  as 
a  man?  He  is  divine,  the  "son  of  God" 
in  the  simple,  old,  poetic  language.  All 
men  are.  He  sanctified  humanity,  most 
human  of  humans,  by  showing  to  what 
heights  men  could  rise.  He  is  one  of 
many  men  imbued  with  a  profound  god- 
consciousness,  who  after  death  have  been 
apotheosised.  Our  poetising  faculty,  es- 
pecially as  it  exists  in  simple  minds, 
builds  legends  and  marvels  about  the 
birth  and  death  of  such  men.  These 
stories,  cast  in  form  by  succeeding  gene- 
rations, perhaps  by  disciples  who  have 
mirrored  their  inspiration  and  are  pos- 
sessed of  a  calmness  and  poise  which  the 
prophets  along  with  their  furor  could  not 
have,  become  popular  history.  Is  there 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

not,  oh  faithful  heart,  a  geographical 
distribution  of  the  avatars  of  mankind 
just  as  there  is  a  palm  belt  and  a  fir-tree 
belt  about  our  dancing  globe  ?  Prophets 
of  distinct  religious  enthusiasm,  so  far  in 
our  race's  history,  have  been  born  only 
within  certain  latitudes. 


[8] 


II. 

Forgive  me  that  I  hear  thy  creeds 

Unawed  and  unafraid; 
They  are  too  small  for  one  whose  ears 

Have  heard  God's  organ  played; 
Who  in  vast,  noble  solitudes 

In  simple  faith  has  prayed. 

ELLA  HIGGINSON. 

WHAT  did  they  say  to  you  in  the  "re- 
treat" that  set  your  soul  a-quivering  ?  Of 
the  duty  of  a  priest?  Of  his  peculiar 
sanctification ?  What  frightened  you? 
Not  their  "logic"  certainly.  What  can 
it  be? 

Last  night  I  sat  till  ten  watching  the 
light  of  your  study  windows,  wondering 
what  kept  you,  fearing  that  your  Phari- 
saical superiors  were  blaming  you  for 
some  act  they  turned  into  a  peccadillo. 
You  wanted  to  come,  did  you  not?  To 
[9] 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 

gain  a  grain  of  comfort  I  was  saying  all 
the  while  to  myself,  "He  certainly  loves 
me.  He  is  not  trying  me  willingly.  But 
he  little  realizes  that  this  waiting  for  him 
to  leave  the  church  and  learn  to  stand 
alone  is  eating  my  life  and  breaking  my 
heart." 

You  do  not  know  that  constantly  with 
me  is  the  fear  that  in  the  end  our  love 
may  not  be  the  strongest  bond.  It  is  the 
best  bond,  yes.  But  mere  habit  has  over- 
ruled men  at  times — and  you  have  been 
taught  such  absurd  estimate  of  custom 
and  convention.  Custom  and  conven- 
tion have  crippled  your  church  in  her 
past;  they  have  appealed  to  her  rever- 
ence and  consideration  and  dictated  her 
course  in  critical  junctures.  They  may 
direct  you.  Do  not  choose  the  meaner 
life.  Do  not  let  lower  estimates  affect 
you  now.  I  cannot  have  been  mistaken. 
Do  you  want  to  be  separated  from  me? 
Do  you  never  wish  to  hear  me  say  again, 
"Dear  heart,  I  love  you" ? 

I  yearn  over  you  as  a  mother  yearns 
1 10] 


A  WOMAN'S    HEART 

over  her  child.  Women  in  their  latent 
motherhood  often  have  this  emotion  tow- 
ards lover  and  husband — more  often,  I 
think,  than  men  have  the  sense  of  fath- 
erhood towards  the  wife. 

No,  not  all  the  priests  who  have  left 
the  church  have  been  evil  men.  A  tale, 
dear  heart.  Look  at  the  other  side.  See 
the  letters,  and  "  Table  Talk,"  and  for- 
mal writings  of  Luther.  They  evidence 
that  he  was  not  the  licentious,  drunken 
pretender  your  church  holds  him  to  have 
been.  And  Knox — was  he  not  for  many 
a  year  a  reputable  priest  ?  If  he  had  not 
followed  some  other  dictate  than  his  ease 
and  advantage,  he  would  not  have  had 
the  stormy  after-life  which  he  suffered 
partly  in  exile  and  always  in  onerous 
work.  And  others  of  those  reforming 
priests — for  instance,  Zwingli ;  and  men 
not  priests  but  leaders,  such  as  Calvin, 
Ulrich  von  Hutten,  Giordano  Bruno ;  and 
other  men — hosts  of  them — were  they 
not  represented  as  monsters  of  iniquity 
[11] 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

to  those  unable  to  come  within  reach  of 
the  broadening  spiritual  impulses  of  their 
time?  But  upon  such  radicals  what  has 
been  the  verdict  of  Prince  Posterity? 
Their  very  persecutors  have  profited  by 
their  great  works. 

The  narrower  and  more  orthodox  mem- 
bers of  every  sect  abuse  those  who 
broaden  beyond  church  and  creed  limi- 
tations. And  when  a  man  openly  and 
boldly  leaves  the  old  faith,  their  contempt 
and  revilings  and  innuendoes  upon  his 
convictions  and  morality  sometimes  out- 
last their  lives.  Men  to-day  who  have 
left  orthodoxy  and  dropped  the  doctrines 
of  their  ecclesiastical  fathers — have  they 
not  been  spurned  by  the  more  conserva- 
tive, even  if  their  lives  are  blameless? 
Think  of  those  you  know  about.  Over  in 
Belgium  there  was  till  lately  Alphonse 
Renard,  at  one  time  a  Jesuit  priest,  an 
authority  in  his  science  of  oceanography, 
whom  his  ecclesiastical  limits  could  not 
restrain. 

You    must   get    absolution   from   my 

[12] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

touch?  You  fear  to  lose  your  soul  by 
leaving  the  church  and  marrying  me? 
To  lose  your  soul!  That  seems  to  be 
your  ever-present  fear.  Since  your  very 
infancy  you  have  been  hypnotised  to  that 
frame  of  mind. 

But  by  your  teachings,  one  to  whom 
Catholicism  is  offered  and  who  rejects  it 
will  suffer  eternally  the  torments  of  hell. 
You  do  not  love  me  in  spite  of  your  pro- 
tests, for,  holding  me  in  your  heart,  you 
would  choose  an  eternity  of  hell  with  me 
rather  than  an  everlasting  heaven  apart 
from  me.  And  if,  by-the-by,  you  have 
not  done  your  duty  to  the  church  and 
shown  me  her  way — and  have  you,  caris- 
sime? — then  are  you  responsible  for  my 
soul  and  its  sufferings — and  you  cannot 
have  a  heaven,  or  at  best  it  will  be  a 
meanly  selfish  one. 

Shall  I  ever  learn  that  it  is  best  for  us 

to  lead  separate  lives  ?    No,  because  it  is 

not.     But  what  would   have  been   our 

happiness  if  our  interests  had  been  united  ? 

[131 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

— if  what  you  cared  for  I  could  have 
shared  in,  and  to  what  I  undertook  you 
could  have  lent  your  sympathetic  inter- 
est. How  fair — your  gentleness  always 
at  hand,  your  discreet  counsel  ever  ready, 
your  strong  arm,  your  shoulder — beloved, 
such  separation  cannot  be  wise. 

Temperate  conventionalities  and  sec- 
ondary moral  laws  melt  before  the  fire  of 
my  love  and  longing  for  you.  If  your 
church  were  a  person  who  knew  me  it 
would  say  I  was  right.  Its  rules  must 
have  been  made  against  the  character  of 
women  according  to  the  distorted,  eccle- 
siastical, misogynous  judgment  of  olden 
time — very  much  alive  even  to  this  day. 
But  we  American  women  are  not  that. 
If  I  were  such  as  your  ecclesiasts  paint 
women  I  should  never  have  loved  you— 
never  have  met  you.  Is  there  no  power 
to  which  you  can  show  the  difference 
and,  showing,  gain  our  union  ?  A  thor- 
oughly equipped  corporation  like  your 
church  should  have  such  a  referendum, 
some  mediation  between  individual  will 
[14] 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 

and  the  will  of    the    Roman    congrega- 
tion. 

You  say  the  Catholic  reference  of  all 
authority  on  conduct  to  church  teachings 
and  council  decrees  is  better  than  the 
appeal  of  the  non-Catholics  to  public 
opinion,  to  what  the  world  would  think. 
But  the  appeal  of  non-Catholics  is  not  to 
the  world,  or  to  what  it  thinks.  Its  test 
is,  is  it  right? — is  it  true? — is  it  in  accord 
with  universal  moral  law? — is  it  right  to 
do  this  thing?  Is  it  True?'9 


[15] 


III. 

My  true-love  hath  my  heart,  and  I  have  his, 
By  just  exchange  one  for  another  given : 
I  hold  his  dear,  and  mine  he  cannot  miss, 
There  never  was  a  better  bargain  driven : 
My  true-love  hath  my  heart,  and  I  have  his. 
SIR  PHILIP  SIDNEY. 

BELOVED,  desire  to  put  my  arms  about 
you  is  so  great  that  I  cannot  forbear 
writing  a  word  and  on  paper  giving  you 
an  embrace.  I  have  thought  of  the  news 
you  brought  on  Friday.  Over  and  over 
again  it  has  turned  in  my  mind  by  night 
and  day.  But  we  must  not  lose  hope,  my 
life.  That  I  say  every  moment.  I  said 
it  yesterday  in  the  first  waking  moments, 
not  yet  wholly  conscious  of  the  weight  of 
sorrow.  All  this  morning  I  was  thinking 
what  I  should  say.  Do  not  misunder- 
stand. I  dread  the  talk  and  want  you  by. 
[16] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

"  Prophete  rechts,  Prophete  links, 
Das  Weltkind  in  der  Mitten." 

Only  the  doctrines  of  absolutism  and  pas- 
sive obedience  I  dread  to  meet,  and  I 
know  they  will  form  and  direct  all  their 
sentences. 

You  see  it  is  difficult  to  cope  with  such 
antagonists  upon  the  ordinary  grounds 
of  reason,  love  and  nature — and  these 
are  the  three  principles  upon  which  I 
stand  in  my  relation  to  you. 

This  suspense — waiting  to  see  what 
Rome  will  do.  I  feel  like  taking  you  in 
my  arms,  and  covering  you  with  my  gar- 
ments, and  saving  you,  keeping  you,  loving 
and  adoring  you  forever.  But  instead  here 
I  am  suffering.  To  see  how  one  would  aid 
one's  heart's  desire  and  to  remain  motion- 
less !  The  torture  of  it !  Oh,  to  see  you  for 
a  moment — only  a  moment  — quite  alone. 

I  dreamed  last  night  that  you  came  to 
my  bedside  and  said,  "The  archbishop 
has  consented.  We  shall  be  married 

and  I  shall  have  a  parish  of  my  own!" 

2  [17] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

The  impossibilities  made  me  speech- 
less until,  "At  last  it  has  come!"  I 
cried.  "  Our  life  shall  be  a  foretaste  of 
heaven."  And  you  clasped  me  close 
with  tears  in  your  dear  eyes.  You  had 
made  a  full  presentation  of  facts  to 
the  archbishop  and  powers  abroad,  I 
dreamed,  but  since  you  feared  the  case 
would  be  decided  against  you,  had  said 
nothing. 

Oh,  to  be  in  your  restful  presence 
morning,  noon,  and  night.  God  made  us 
for  each  other.  The  native  harmony  and 
understanding  that  is  between  us  cannot 
be  chance  concord. 

Only  last  night  I  was  thinking,  "Does 
he  ever  recall  nowadays  the  parsonage  we 
talked  of  in  the  country — the  hauschen 
where  we  were  to  be  unspeakably  happy 
— fair  nature  about  us  and  God  over  all  ?  " 
—a  little,  low  house  painted  soft  grey  by 
rain  and  wind  and  sunshine.  Moss  is 
just  starting  in  crevices  of  the  roof.  It 
faces  the  sea  and  behind  stands  a  copse 

of  pine.     Lilac  bushes  open  their  aro- 
[18] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

matic  blossoms  in  one  corner  of  the  yard, 
and  just  beyond  a  brook  pours  its  sweet 
waters  into  the  salt. 

To  our  friends  when  they  come  we  offer 
rush-bottomed  chairs,  and  blue  china 
on  the  table  from  which  to  eat  our  hom- 
iny and  honey  and  eggs.  Brown-speckled 
hens  lay  the  eggs  I  gather  in  a  melon 
basket.  You  wear  a  linsey-woolsey  coat 
which  I  make  for  you,  and  I  a  homespun 
dress.  Weed  the  garden?  Yes,  and 
water  the  flowers  morning  and  evening. 
Do  you  laugh  ?  Oh,  you  will  with  delight 
when  that  home  is  reached. 

Sometime  after  we  are  married — some- 
time when  you  are  heavy  with  sleep — I 
shall  pull  the  covering  aside  and  kiss  you 
right  there  where  the  heart  beats.  And 
you  will  say,  half-waking  and  putting  out 
your  hand,  "What  is  it,  love?"  And  I 
shall  answer,  kissing  you  again  upon  the 
forehead  and  nestling  close  to  catch  your 
sleepy  mood,  "I  was  only  kissing  the 

place  where  our  dear  heart  beats." 
[19] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

Don't  tell  me  that  instead  you  shall 
abide  within  the  walls  of  a  monastery 
with  silence  as  your  portion.  No.  No, 
you  shall  not.  Promise  me  you  will  not 
go.  It  is  wrong — a  sin,  as  you  say.  The 
body  is  beautiful.  It  is  not  wicked,  as 
monastics  preach.  God  gave  it,  building 
it  during  millions  of  years  through  the 
upward  lift  of  matter.  And  God  gave  its 
promptings  to  be  carefully  and  reason- 
ably guarded.  Oh,  promise  you  will  not 
enter  so  terrible  a  life  and  kill  yourself  by 
fancied  discipline.  It  is  awful,  an  incred- 
ible rage  in  humanity,  a  distorted  East- 
Indian  craze  legitimised  in  your  church 
— that  gross  lie  against  our  best  impulses, 
that  insult  to  God. 

My  arms  tell  me  to  say  they  are  aching 
to  clasp  you  once  more,  and  my  lips  are 
hungry  for  your  lips,  too.  Let  me  see 
your  ringer  under  a  microscope  and  try 
if  I  may  find  that  elusive  quality  which 
makes  your  touch  so  melting. 

Oh,  the  joy  I  had  this  morning  wken  I 

[20] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

rose  in  bed,  pulled  my  curtain,  and  after 
lying  in  watch  a  moment  saw  your  black- 
robed  figure  against  the  white  stretch  of 
snow  beyond.  It  was  like  a  return  of 
salient  youth  to  the  aged.  My  heart 
quickened  and  tears  wet  my  eyes  for 
sheer  delight.  So  it  was  last  night  when 
I  saw  the  gleam  of  light  from  your  win- 
dow. To  see  it  I  had  left  the  Beethoven 
symphony.  But  what  are  all  symphonies 
compared  with  nearness  to  you — even 
though  you  are  behind  the  stone  walls  of 
yonder  house  ?  I  watched  your  light  till 
it  went  out,  and  purposely  kept  myself 
awake  until  I  was  confident  that  you  were 
calmly  sleeping. 

I  have  all  various  loves  for  you.  In  our 
joys  I  am  your  wife.  In  your  distresses 
I  feel  your  mother — to  take  you  in  my 
arms  and  coddle  you.  I  wish  you  were 
not  more  than  three  spans  long  that  I 
might  enfold  you,  kiss  you,  press  you 
against  my  heart  and  unblushing  tell  you 
all  that  warms  my  lips  and  now  embold- 
ens my  pen. 

[21] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

The  intense  unswerving  love  and  dog- 
like  fidelity  of  woman !  I  know  from  my- 
self what  it  is.  Fancy  you  and  me  caught 
in  a  March  blizzard  upon  a  Dakota 
prairie.  I  know  what  I  should  then 
feel  happiest  in  doing — in  wrapping  my 
clothing  about  you  and  covering  you 
with  my  body  from  sleet  and  cold  and 
death.  I  can  fancy  myself  with  my  arms 
about  you  saying,  "Are  you  warm,  dear 
heart?'* 

But  it  is  now  Sunday  morning,  and 
through  the  soft  wet  air  and  sunshine  I 
hear  your  voice  intoning  the  first  service. 
There  is  ever  the  same  ineffable  sweet- 
ness and  charm  in  its  sound. 

"I  think,  O  my  Love,  'tis  thy  voice,  from  the  Kingdom 

of  Souls 
Faintly  answering." 

Now  if  I  should  save  your  soul — not 
in  the  mediaeval  but  modern  way — would 
your  life  be  happy?  If  you  had  moral 
conviction.  Don't  you  see,  dear,  that 

your  faith  is  but  an  attitude  of  mind,  for 
[22] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

the  most  part  an  obsolete  phase  of  civil- 
isation? In  the  midst  of  our  twentieth 
century  science  it  is  an  electrified  corpse. 
You  believe  in  it,  you  say.  But  you  do 
not  know  anything  else.  Your  church 
authorities  forbid  you  to  hear  or  read  any 
other  teachings,  or  to  see  other  religious 
expression.  You  follow  Paul  in  much  of 
his  fiery  narrowness.  Why  can  you  not 
also  broaden  to  his  advice  of  trying  all 
things  and  holding  fast  to  that  which  is 
good  ? 

Your  religion  has  beauties,  its  long 
historic  growth  and  background,  its  many 
wise  and  good  prophets,  apostles  and 
messiahs  of  the  oneness  of  man  with  the 
divine.  They  have  clung  to  the  truth 
and  sometimes  tried  to  right  the  lies. 
Why  give  them  up?  Theresa  might  be 
the  zealous  ascetic  and  egotistical  prac- 
tician still.  In  the  real,  human  good  she 
did  she  is  Saint  Theresa  to  all  human 
souls. 

When  I  hear  your  music  and  petition 
to  the  Mother,  I  am  with  you  full  of 
[23] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

yearnings  for  womanly  guidance  and 
sympathy  and  the  sweet,  hovering  quality 
of  the  eternal-feminine.  This  longing  is 
in  every  soul — men's  and  women's.  It 
was  there  back  of  our  Christian  times 
when  men  called  upon  the  chaste  Arte- 
mis, and  maids  of  Periclean  Athens 
marched  through  the  limpid  air — &<* 
Xafj.xpoTa.Too  aioipos — over  the  marble  steps 
of  the  Propylsea  to  the  shrine  of  Athena 
and  the  precious  Phidian  glories  shining 
in  the  cella's  dim  light.  Our  reforma- 
tory ecclesiasts  lost  a  line  by  which  to 
hold  subject  their  fellow-men  when  they 
put  womanly  force  from  their  churches. 
All  women  long  for  womanhood  as  well 
as  manhood  in  uplifting  tradition.  Again 
men  blundered  when  they  called  God 
"He."  God  is  neither  he  nor  she.  Then 
why  forever  say  "  He  ?  " 

The  art  of  your  old  cathedrals — their 
beautiful  outlines,  their  tender  pictures, 
their  enchanting  carvings — is  potent. 
They  may  lead  one  momentarily  to  for- 
get your  grossly  material  and  revolting 
[24] 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 

conception  that  the  body  of  Jesus  is  lying 
within  the  shrine.  And  your  liturgical 
proceedings,  your  incantations,  the  mil- 
linery your  priests  put  on,  the  dramatic 
effect  and  scenic  display  they  aim  at — to 
carry  to  the  imagination  of  believers  the 
faith  that  God,  like  humans,  is  hypnotised 
by  genuflexions  and  denial  of  our  self- 
respect — all  such  things  sicken  a  pure 
faith,  weaken  a  sturdy  intellect. 


[25] 


IV. 

Ich  ungliicksel'ger  Atlas!  eine  Welt, 

Die  ganze  Welt  der  Schmerzen,  muss  ich  tragen, 

Ich  trage  Unertragliches,  und  brechen 

Will  mir  das  Herz  im  Leibe. 

HEINE. 

THIS  morning  I  know  where  you  are,  for 
the  old  women  are  going  along  the  road- 
side with  tlueir  beads.  If  belief  in  your 
myths  could  cover  me,  I  should  buy  a 
string  and  go  along  too.  Then  would 
be  saved  great  pain. 

But  the  immaterial  structure  about  you 
is  not  divine.  It  is  not  even  good  or  right. 
It  is  unholy  because  it  selfishly  destroys 
many  helpless  human  lives  just  as  it  de- 
stroys yours  and  mine,  and  turns  to  ashes 
the  loves  of  men  and  women.  Comfort 
to  some  weak  souls  it  may  bring — in  re- 
ward to  their  deference  to  its  fables. 
[26] 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 

But  the  comfort  it  might  give,  and 
the  happiness!  Its  spiritual  consolations 
might  be  greater  if  its  merciless  laws  and 
dogmatism  were  wiped  away  for  ever. 
You  might  be  my  husband  and  still  carry 
hope  to  the  sick,  aid  to  the  orphans,  cheer 
to  the  discouraged,  help  to  the  stumbling 
and  fallen,  and  be  the  sweet,  charitable 
adviser  beloved  of  God  and  men. 

I  do  not  say  this  in  play.  Tears  are  in 
my  eyes  and  emptiness  is  gnawing  my 
heart.  It  is  the  ache  of  a  love  that  de- 
spairs of  fulfilment — which  endeavours  to 
realise  that  it  has  no  place  in  the  future 
hopes  and  plans  of  the  one  it  adores.  It 
aches  all  the  time  steadily,  by  day  and  by 
night.  Because  of  it  I  cannot  sleep.  If 
I  cannot  sleep  I  cannot  work.  So  the 
idleness  of  gnawing  away  my  own  heart 
and  mind — pinioned  like  the  poor  aider 
of  men  of  Promethean  legend,  and  preyed 
upon  by  a  hunger — and  watching  for 
some  glimpse  of  you  through  the  un- 
friendly foliage.  Think  of  such  hours. 

Now  and  then  a  little  hope  will  start. 

[27] 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

But  some  frosty  dogmatism  of  your  utter- 
ance nips  it  before  it  has  fairly  burst  the 
soil. 

Now  they  are  singing  the  "Agnus  Dei," 
and  I  am  sitting  by  the  window  to  hear 
your  voice  and  thinking  what  the  ele- 
ments are  that  bind  you.  Form  is  the 
main.  That  is  clear.  (There  is  your 
voice  again.  I  could  hear  one  word 
"domine."  Sound  of  the  people's  kneel- 
ing and  rising  comes  clearly,  the  air  is  so 
still.)  And  shall  we  be  sacrificed  to 
form,  I  say?  My  soul  cries  " No."  Your 
rules  change.  This  rule  that  separates 
us  cannot  exist.  It  must  change.  Then 
shall  we  be  sacrificed?  No.  No.  No. 
We  shall  suffer,  as  we  said,  if  we  forestall 
public  opinion.  But  we  shall  be  right, 
and  I  would  rather  be  right  than  be  pope. 
We  shall  have  each  other.  The  power 
that  makes  for  righteousness  shall  be  on 
our  side,  and  with  God's  aid  and  yours  I 
can  carry  any  burden. 

But  your  rules  do  change.  It  was  for- 
merly an  unheard-of  thing  for  a  woman  to 
[28] 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

sing  in  your  churches — because  ecclesi- 
asts  taught  nasty  things  about  women.  In 
some  countries  the  prejudice  is  almost  as 
strong  as  against  the  marriage  of  priests. 
But  of  late  years  in  how  many  of  your 
churches  have  women  been  singing? 
Can  you  not,  with  the  idea  of  God  and 
his  judgment,  superior  to  any  creed  or 
petty  ruling,  or  lip-worship,  and  with  the 
tenderest  and  most  loving  care  my  heart 
can  give — can  you  not  do  what  is  right? 
Dearest,  I  ask  this  a  thousand  times.  To 
see  those  qualities  I  find  in  you  loved  and 
honoured !  I  cannot  give  you  up.  I  have 
tried  and  I  cannot.  I  will  go  anywhere- 
only  let  me  have  you. 

Ah,  if  you  were  not  a  priest,  dear,  if 
you  knew  women,  you  would  know  that 
the  delay  of  a  word  is  all  the  difference 
between  light-heartedness  and  gaiety, 
depression  and  gloom.  When  I  expect 
a  letter  and  none  comes,  I  cannot  be 
happy.  This  morning  the  sun  is  at  his 

shining,  and  the  birds  in  their  first  spring 
[29] 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

songs.  But  joy  of  life  is  through  a  veil. 
The  letter  which  you  promised  came  not. 
Yet  when  I  see  you  after  such  a  time,  all 
the  agony  and  sharp  remembrance  of 
the  agony  fade  at  sight  of  your  face  and 
the  happiness  your  presence  brings. 

When  I  look  about  on  all  this  rising  tide 
of  spring  and  ask  myself  what  is  the 
clearest  and  most  beautiful  expression  of 
God — the  budding  leaves  and  tender 
green  of  new  foliage,  the  blossoming  trees, 
the  sly  jacks  standing  in  their  pulpits 
down  yonder  shady  ravine,  the  violets 
purpling  the  earth,  "the  naid-like  lily  of 
the  vale,"  the  liquid  call  of  the  oriole,  the 
even-song  of  robins — none  of  these  is 
God's  most  loving  voice  and  sign  of  pres- 
ence, but  my  very  heart  of  hearts,  which 
you  are,  that  is  the  clearest  and  most 
beautiful  word  God  has  spoken.  Thou 
art  God's  best  message. 

My  life  began  again  when  I  met  you. 
Until  then  I  had  been  one  with  eyes  and 
saw  not,  and  with  feeling  and  felt  not. 

The  day  I  first  spoke  to  you  there  seemed 
[30] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

a  dawning  of  a  new  life,  a  resurrection  of 
things  of  another  life,  a  renewal  of  vital 
force  within  me.  I  lived,  but  with  a  new 
spirit. 

Whenever  I  hear  the  music  from  your 
church  I  listen,  and  wonder  if  you  are 
there,  and  hold  my  head  towards  it,  and 
endeavour  to  discover  from  the  sounds 
whether  it  is  your  voice — save  when  you 
are  away,  and  then  I  pass  hastily  saying: 
"  It  is  the  funeral  mass  of  some  poor  soul ; 
or  mayhap  some  saint's  day." 

The  music  is  sweeter  at  vespers  when 
you  are  there,  the  rites  seem  actually 
holy  and  God  is  present  in  body — if  God 
can  be  anywhere  in  body.  But  the  body 
I  see  is  your  body,  and  it  is  the  God  in 
you  I  adore. 

But  why  do  you  repeat  the  "Hail 
Mary"  so  many  times?  Jesus  said, 
"  Beware  of  vain  repetition."  If  the  spirit 
of  the  mother  of  Jesus  is  not  hard-hearted, 
or  deaf,  or  inattentive,  she  must  have 

heard  one  heart-felt  supplication,  or  two 
[31] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

or  three  at  most.  What  fortune,  then,  in 
repeating  the  same  word  thirty  times  ?  Is 
it  not  "vain  repetition"  ?  If  not,  what  sort 
of  repetition  is  it  ? 

Such  rhythmic  repetition  has  its  effects. 
It  lulls  the  mind  like  a  cradle  song.  It  is 
a  cradle  song — as  perhaps  the  church 
knows.  It  hypnotises.  It  magnetises  the 
poor,  tired,  untrained  minds  that  make  up 
the  mass  of  your  hearers.  It  produces 
curious  mental  phases.  I  have  never  yet 
seen  a  Catholic  who  did  not  impress 
me  as  suffering  atrophy  of  certain  of  the 
mental  faculties.  The  wide-awakeness, 
alertness,  individual  energy  of  the  Acatho- 
lics  is  replaced  by  a  sort  of  intellectual 
somnolence,  which,  I  suppose,  is  induced 
by  repetitions  and  hypnotising  ceremo- 
nial, and  reliance  upon  authority. 

As  to  the  converts  of  which  you  yester- 
day spoke,  they  are,  here  in  America,  like 
those  your  church  makes  in  Rome — of 
Anglo-Saxon  stock  I  speak — few  other 

than  the  intellectually  maimed,  halt,  and 

[32] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

blind.  Do  you  think  that  with  the  Irish 
and  Italians  coming  from  Europe,  and 
the  French  Canadians  immigrating  from 
the  north,  your  church  will  gain  a  great 
part  of  our  teeming  country  ?  New  Eng- 
land rocks  and  their  scant  attrition  would 
be  hardly  a  fat  or  fertile  setting  for  your 
unctuous  ceremonial,  or  the  weak  con- 
victions and  characterless  masses  its  prev- 
alence brings  forth.  What  a  replacing  of 
the  granitic  character  of  the  Puritans!— 
and  the  simple  truth  of  the  early  Dutch! 
But  so  in  numbers  it  is  impending. 
After  moral  elevation  has  builded,  eccle- 
siasticism  comes  to  reap  the  riches  of  plain 
living  and  high  thinking — foreign  priests 
and  French  nuns  and,  under  the  azure 
depths  of  Kentucky,  that  absurd  old  fan- 
tasy, a  silent  monastery.  We  have  be- 
come a  rich  country.  Priestcraft  thrives 
best  where  luxury  gives  ground  to  pride 
and  superstition  and  ignorance  and 
poverty.  With  luxury  ecclesiastical  graft 
becomes  easy.  Seeing  this  is  a  difficult 

thing  to  a  real  American.    For  it  means 
3  [33] 


A   WOMAN^S    HEART 

the  disintegration  of  our  dearest  founda- 
tions. 

If  we  had  not  builded  a  great  Puritan 
nation,  and  grown  strong  and  rich  and 
opulent,  priests  would  not  be  flocking 
and  multiplying  here  and  putting  in  a 
drivelling  claim  about  "first  possession." 
First  possession!  Aside  from  a  few 
French  in  the  age  of  faith,  they  waited  till 
ease  and  riches  were  at  hand. 

Those  jeers  at  the  Puritans  which  your 
colleagues  are  so  fond  of  making — they  are 
ungrateful.  If  it  had  not  been  for  Puritan 
self-sacrifice,  Puritan  tenacity,  Puritan 
moral  elevation,  you  would  not  find  a 
home  in  the  country  to-day.  The  Puritans 
strove  for  Liberty — liberty  to  think  accord- 
ing to  their  conscience,  liberty  to  speak  out 
their  thoughts,  liberty  of  self-expression, 
liberty  to  love  liberty.  They  produced 
some  of  the  greatest  peoples,  some  of  the 
greatest  government,  some  of  the  great- 
est conduct  in  the  private  affairs  of  life, 
some  of  the  greatest  poetry,  some  of  the 

greatest  prose  of  the  world,  and  the  moral 

[34] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

impulse  they  fought  and  died  for  has 
come  to  be  one  of  the  great  possessions  of 
mankind  for  all  time  and  for  all  lands. 
If  in  times  of  peace  they  used  force  to 
keep  out  aliens  whom  they  judged  fatal 
to  their  community  interests,  it  was  the 
force  that  an  unarmed  husbandman  takes 
at  sight  of  some  seemingly  evil  creature. 
The  tools  they  used,  remember,  were  the 
simplest  inventions  of  the  ecclesiastical 
ingenuity  of  your  Inquisition. 

To  me  the  Puritans  and  their  works 
are  one  of  the  noblest  expressions  of  our 
human  race  in  its  struggle  with  supersti- 
tion and  the  diabolism  of  priestcraft.  No 
people  but  the  Jews  has  shown  a  greater 
religious  emotion,  and  none  has  surpassed 
them  in  a  living  sense  of  the  moral  law. 

Catholicism  is  the  religion  that  will 
supervene  in  America  after  the  dry  rot  has 
seized  upon  the  energies  of  the  people- 
never  before.  It  is  the  religion  of  disap- 
pointed hopes  and  ambition — for  the 
laity.  Its  priesthood  teaches  content  with 

narrow  limitations  by  imposing  them,  and 
[35] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

endeavours  to  make  up  for  a  lack  of 
worldly  goods  among  its  supporting  peo- 
ples by  spectacular  display  and  theatrical 
pomp — the  priests  being  the  chief  actors. 
Not  long  ago  one  of  your  archbishops 
crowned  an  image  of  "Our  Lady  of 
Mount  Carmel"  in  a  park  in  New  York 
named  after  Thomas  Jefferson — Thomas 
Jefferson,  heaven  save  the  mark!  Two 
hundred  priests,  "monsignori "  (supposedly 
thinking  men)  and  acolytes  followed  the 
statue  and  led  thousands  of  Italians. 
The  crown  was  of  pure  gold  and  set  with 
many  gems,  some  of  which  were  given 
by  the  pope. 

How  nauseating!  And  within  a  stone's 
throw  of  the  whole  fanfare  were  housed 
people  in  need  of  the  simplest  elements 
of  decent  living.  "  Men  die  of  many  dis- 
eases," said  Sir  Leslie  Stephen,  "creeds 
of  only  one,  that  of  being  found  out.'* 

What  an  incongruity  in  an  American 

landscape   is    a   priest   in    cassock    and 

berretta!    The  idea  that  he   cannot  be 

a  true  American  citizen  is  a  right  one. 

[36] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

At  its  core,  it  is  as  true  now  as  when 
Landor  wrote,  "The  popish  priesthood 
by  its  institutions,  its  interests  and  its 
vows  must  always  be  opposed  to  the  civil 
magistrate."  Any  man  with  genuine  in- 
dependence of  spirit,  loyalty  to  right  and 
truth  and  belief  in  human  dignity  and 
hard-headedness — which  are  unfailing  sig- 
nets of  the  American  spirit  whether  in 
1776  or  in  these  days — any  man  with 
these  great  possessions  could  not  pros- 
trate himself  prone  on  his  forehead,  as 
your  ecclesiasticism  forces  her  priests  to 
fall  before  her.  His  manhood  would  not 
permit  the  servile  act.  Its  very  hideous 
resignation  of  manly  self,  its  abrogation 
of  free  acts,  its  subordination  of  all  direc- 
tions and  tendencies  of  thought  and  feel- 
ing to  the  powers  over  in  Italian  Rome- 
think  of  the  spirit  of  1776  thus  denying 
its  human  rights. 

So  it  is  I  say  that  no  genuine  American, 

no  man  filled  with  the  spirit  that  incited, 

founded  and  built  up  our  commonwealth 

of  these  United  States  could  ever  become 

[37] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

a  Catholic  priest.  "The  Roman  Catho- 
lics have  always  claimed  to  be  independ- 
ent of  all  governments,  and  to  use  all 
governments  for  their  own  purposes." 

The  Catholic  Church  must  grow  to 
Americanism,  dear  heart,  if  it  would  here 
endure.  Some  day  American  priests  will 
become  too  independent  to  refer  to  Rome. 
It  is  inevitable.  There  will  be  no  St. 
Peter's  chair. 

Shall  our  lives  be  marred — ruined — 
by  passing  tradition  or  strengthened  by 
everlasting  truth? — which  erat  in  prin- 
cipio,  et  nunc,  et  semper  et  in  ssecula 
sseculorum. 


[38] 


V. 

And  the  poor  Pope  was  sure  it  must  be  so, 

Else  wherefore  did  the  people  kiss  his  toe  ? 

The  subtle  Jesuit  cardinal  shook  his  head, 

And  mildly  looked  and  said, 

It  mattered  not  a  jot 

Whether  the  thing,  indeed,  were  so  or  not; 

Religion  must  be  kept  up,  and  the  Church  preserved, 

And  for  the  people  this  best  served. 

And  then  he  turned,  and  added  most  demurely, 

'Whatever  may  befall, 

We  Catholics  need  no  evidence  at  all, 

The  holy  father  is  infallible,  surely!' 

*****###:;: 

And  dignitaries  of  the  Church  came  by. 
It  had  been  worth  to  some  of  them,  they  said, 
Some  hundred  thousand  pounds  a  year  a  head. 
If  it  fetched  so  much  in  the  market,  truly, 
'Twas  not  a  thing  to  be  given  up  unduly. 

ARTHUR  HUGH  CLOUGH. 

Bur  you  will  not  be  a  slave  to  your  past. 

It  is  wrong,  dear  heart,  "an  abuse,"  as 

[39] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

Catholics  say.  You  will  not  sacrifice 
your  life  and  mine  to  an  abuse.  And  we 
shall  be  married  ?  Some  day,  very  soon  ? 
I  cannot  live — without  you  I  do  not  want 
to  live.  You  shall  not  fear  to  fall  back  in 
the  old  way.  I  shall  be  with  you ;  and  if 
by-and-by  I  must  die  and  be  lost  to  you, 
there  will  be  the  memory  of  our  brave 
struggle  in  your  heart.  If  the  dead  live 
again  I  shall  be  near  you  in  spirit  always. 
Is  it  so?  All  the  rest  would  weigh  as 
thistle-down  compared  with  your  love 
for  me?  Dearest  heart,  is  it  only  your 
faith,  adherence  to  authority  and  to  child- 
ish ideas  and  ideals,  that  hold  you  ?  And 
you  believe  in  and  trust  them  so  implic- 
itly? I  have  said  about  them  what  I 
could  of  faithlessness.  I  have  laughed  at 
customs  and  usages,  made  for  other  gen- 
erations and  centuries,  and  you  have 
been  angry.  Showing  the  sawdust  in 
your  doll  was  sad  work  to  both  of  us. 

If  you  could  accept  ideas  of  growth! 
Now  there  is  the  church — that  is  my  fin- 
ger, yes,  the  finger  for  the  wedding-ring 
[40] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

— see  from  what  manners  of  a  simple- 
minded  peasantry  on  the  shores  of  Gali- 
ilee  the  ponderous  ceremonial  and  bar- 
barous pomp  of  the  Vatican  have  grown! 
Think  of  the  simplicity  and  beauty  of  life 
of  those  early  Christian  communists. 
Under  a  mothering  sky  and  upon  a  soil 
that  shot  forth  harvests  sometimes  of  a 
hundredfold,  and  blown  upon  by  winds 
that  nurtured  the  grape  and  olive — with 
half  the  humanity  that  stirs  the  hardest 
hearts  of  our  century,  we  should  have 
girded  up  our  garments  and  climbed  over 
the  rocky  cliffs  of  Tiberius  and  bent  in 
reverence  before  the  teacher.  How  the 
native  grace  of  Jesus,  increased  by  years 
of  thought  and  study,  must  have  yearned 
for  a  companionship  more  alert  and  open 
than  the  peasants  about  him  could  bring ! 
Perhaps  their  very  condition  was  the 
reason  of  his  accenting  their  work  for 
their  own  souls,  and  so  little  for  the  souls 
of  others. 

It  is  all  simple  and  calm  and  natural 
when  you  drop  the  unhealthiness  of  super- 
[41] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

naturalism  and  look  only  to  the  direct 
teaching  of  a  master.  Then  we  have 
righteousness  and  the  natural  religious 
emotion  that  stirs  in  every  heart.  Nothing 
there  absurdly  contradictory  to  all  facts 
and  experiences  of  life.  And  we  have  no 
more  a  very  human  institution  claiming 
divinity  by  reason  of  its  long  duration, 
protracted  life  and  vitality  and  factitious 
vigour;  and  again  life  by  reason  of  its 
divinity. 

How  else  should  your  church  have  sur- 
vived the  irruption  of  the  northern  hordes 
in  Italy  ? — the  dark  ages  ? — mediaeval- 
ism?  Why  should  it  not  have  survived? 
What  power  of  half  the  material  force 
opposed  it  ?  Of  its  age  ? — there  are  older 
institutions  which  you  do  not  believe  to 
be  divine.  Of  its  divinity — think  of  the 
effectless  work  of  some  of  its  deep- 
thoughted  reformers.  Remember  Arius, 
Rienzi,  Wycliife  and  many  an  English- 
man of  Wycliffe's  time,  Savonarola,  So- 
cinus.  And  then,  "A  divine  institution 

ought  to  convince  the  minds  of  men  by 
[421 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

its  inherent  quality  of  truth,  ought  it 
not?"  says  Balzac. 

Morever,  was  there  not  at  the  very  core 
the  inspiring  dicta  of  Jesus  ?  These  were 
the  principles  of  truth,  of  soul  beauty, 
that  worked  its  survival  in  its  shock  with 
the  strong  men  of  the  north.  They  were 
the  divine  sparks  of  saving  grace.  Deep 
within,  its  soil  was  rational.  Like  all  else 
founded  in  truth,  it  grew  and  increased  in 
spite  of  devices  and  the  deforming  fig- 
ments superstition  wrought. 

But  the  assertion  regarding  the  devel- 
opment of  the  church  and  its  hold  upon 
civilization — that  surely  does  not  deter- 
mine its  divinity.  -It  does?  Does,  then, 
the  development  and  influence  of  some 
other  thing,  or  the  generation  of  a  new 
idea  which  you  would  not  call  divine  ? 
Take  any  instance.  The  use  of  steam 
made  over  our  material  life  and  greatly 
advanced  our  development.  Is  it  logical 
to  conclude,  therefore,  that  the  birth  of 
the  idea  of  the  use,  whether  in  the  brain 

of  the  French  scientists  or  the  English 
[43] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

workmen,  came  about  through  the  ex- 
traordinary acts  of  infinite  and  eternal 
power  ?  Does  it  not  rather  enhance  your 
conception  of  mankind  to  know  that  by 
human  reason,  human  patience,  human 
ingenuity,  skill,  experiment  and  learning, 
the  value  and  force  of  superheated  water 
as  a  motor  power  were  brought  forth  ? 

In  the  moral  world  are  the  men  who 
better  human  conditions  by  the  steadfast 
teaching  of  better  things — are  they  any 
more  the  children  of  God,  any  nearer 
God  in  nativity  than  you  and  I  ?  Were 
the  authors,  for  instance,  of  "The  Rights 
of  Man"  nearer?  Are  the  advocates  and 
leaders  of  a  juster  and  completer  social 
order  more  divine  ? 

Of  this  question  of  the  divinity  of  the 
church,  her  course  in  history  is  a  suffi- 
cient negation.  We  need  go  back  very 
little  to  learn.  In  France  within  the  nine- 
teenth century,  when  the  opportunity  for 
alliance  with  civil  liberty  offered,  when 
Lamennais,  Lacordaire,  Montalembert 

led  the  way,  when  progressive  democracy 
[44] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

was  in  the  air,  the  church  turned  upon 
political  liberty,  and  coquetting  with 
Louis  Napoleon  became  finally  his  not 
too  reputable  thrall.  In  writers  of  your 
faith  I  find  these  facts.  Was  such  action 
precisely  divine  ? 

The  church  has  had  long  life  because 
of  its  precepts  of  love,  sympathy  and  hu- 
man helpfulness  hidden  in  its  mummeries, 
because  of  its  vast  material  riches  and  the 
superstition  it  nurses  in  its  peoples. 
Buddhism  has  had  a  longer  life  for  like 
reasons. 

Here  in  America  the  church — perhaps 
because  of  its  smaller  power — has  done 
better  than  in  France.  So  far  it  has 
made  semblance  of  the  idea  of  civil  lib- 
erty. Democracy  it  now  proclaims  the 
church's  own  child—  "an  earnest  effort  to 
realise  in  society  the  unity  of  the  race,  hu- 
man brotherhood,  and  the  natural  equal- 
ity of  all  men,  asserted  in  the  Incarnation 
and  Redemption."  This  social  condition 
the  church  condemned  and  anathematised 
until  its  strength  and  liberty  afforded 
[45] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

opportunity  for  the  church's  workings. 
Certain  social  tendencies  which  it  now 
rejects,  forbids,  and  calls  bad  names,  after 
their  ultimate  adoption  and  a  few  gen- 
erations have  passed,  it  will  proclaim 
—if  the  church  still  exists — as  at  one  with 
itself,  taught  and  practised  by  the  early 
Christians  and  "asserted  in  the  Incarna- 
tion and  Redemption." 

Time  and  again  in  the  progress  of  the 
human  race  it  has  played  this  little  com- 
edy. The  fallibility  of  it  is  evaded  by  the 
formulae  of  ecclesia  gubernans  and  eccle- 
sia  docens.  In  this  case  it  is  a  question  of 
morals  and  the  infallible  ecclesia  docens 
which  errs.  Real  liberty,  dear  heart,  the 
church  knows  not.  Its  clergy  are  still  its 
bonded  slaves.  How?  Not  to  mention 
more  important  instances,  in  the  celibacy 
it  entails,  "the  bulwark  of  the  church," 
which  arose  from  an  imagination  steeped 
in  supernaturalism  and  monstrous  con- 
ceptions of  women. 

Moreover,  it  makes  a  priest  in  every 
way  a  slave,  an  involuntary  servitor,  to 
[46] 


- 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

his  past,  to  his  vows  taken  at  an  early  age 
in  ignorance  and  inexperience  of  himself 
and  the  world.  What  does  the  youthful 
seminarian  know  of  what  God  shall  dic- 
tate to  him  in  the  coming  years,  and  his 
own  being  and  growth  demand  ?  And  if 
he  breaks  away  from  the  priesthood, 
what  possibilities  of  life,  or  bread-win- 
ning, or  avocation  are  his  ?  He  is  ostra- 
cised and  stigmatised  by  all  his  former 
comrades  and  co-religionists,  and  their 
contempt  breeds  distrust  in  others.  He 
must  always  be  consistent  with  himself? 
To  be  true  to  his  real  self  he  must  be  in- 
consistent. Ah,  yes,  look  at  the  root  in- 
con-sto.  It  is  moving  with  and  accommo- 
dating one's  self  to  forces  and  agencies, 
few  of  which  can  be  foreseen.  It  is  seizing 
upon  and  using  all  that  can  be  turned  to 
good.  And  the  youthful  seminarian  is 
taught  a  regard  for  formals  and  externals 
—mainly  for  externals.  It  is  by  exter- 
nals, by  sensuous  rituals  and  ceremonies 
that  the  credulity  and  reverence  of  the 

ignorant  many  are  appealed  to,  and  the 

[47] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

aesthetic  instincts  of  the  few  are  tickled 
and  made  potential  in  the  growth  of  their 
religious  emotion. 


[48] 


VI. 

An  amor  dolor  sit, 
An  dolor  amor  sit, 

Utrumque  nescio; 
Hoc  unum  sentio, 
Jucundus  dolor  est, 

Si  dolor  amor  est. 

BERNARD  OF  CLAIRVAUX. 

OH,  it  is  well  that  we  are  surrounded, 
held  in  check  by  conventional  trammels. 
Otherwise  I  know  not  what  we  might  do. 
If  restraints  were  not  great  about  me  I 
should  give  myself  wholly  to  you  to  make 
or  to  mar.  I  should  leave  all,  go  to  you, 
give  myself  to  be  merged  in  you  body  and 
soul.  I  should  have  no  power  of  with- 
standing. Something  greater  than  I  bids 
me  follow  now.  But  there  is  your  envi- 
ronment and  I  am  "saved."  Say  rather 

maimed  for  life — two  of  us,  your  life  and 
4  [49] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

mine  made  desolate.  Look  at  the  loves, 
the  ephemeral  which  are  united — and 
ours  which  is  eternal  made  a  cruel  deso- 
lation. Does  not  your  faith  in  things  that 
are,  cry  to  heaven  ?  God  never  meant  it 
so. 

I  said  to  a  woman  to-day  that  of 
those  I  had  met,  you,  the  most  simple, 
direct,  and  ingenuous  of  all,  modest  to  a 
fault,  you  had  influenced  my  life  the 
most,  that  you  had  given  its  current  calm- 
ness and  clarity.  She  is  a  worldly  woman 
and  was  once  a  Catholic.  She  raised  her 
eyebrows.  I  added  that  I  could  look  back 
and  see  the  change,  and  that  I  could  kiss 
the  hem  of  your  garment  for  all  you  had 
brought  me. 

Men  say  you  are  unaffected  and  in- 
genuous. They  never  say  you  are  wise. 
And  yet  you  have  taught  me  more  than 
all  the  poets  and  philosophers  and  his- 
torians, for  you  have  taught  me  what  love 
is,  how  it  can  make  life  glorious  and 
clothe  the  commonest  and  meanest  thing 

in  sanctified  light.     For  is  not  the  very 

[50] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

wafer  you  bless  precious  to  my  eyes  ? 
And  of  all  the  throng  in  yonder  city  there 
is  but  one  whose  look,  whose  thought, 
whose  wish,  whose  admiration,  whose 
touch  I  value.  All  others  are  automata. 
Their  motion,  talk,  and  concourse  are 
phantasmagoria.  I  am  all  the  time  look- 
ing beyond  them  and  stretching  my  neck 
for  a  glimpse  of  You  the  Everlasting. 

There  is  about  our  love  such  a  tender- 
ness, devotion,  holiness — such  absence 
of  querulous  complainings,  puny  esti- 
mates, and  deference  to  conventional  nar- 
rowness— that  I  am  sure  it  must  live  out 
of  pure  largeness  and  cleanness  of  spirit. 

But  love  loves  to  be  with  what  it  loves. 
This  law  at  times  leads  my  great  love  for 
you  to  try  to  leap  the  fence  ecclesiasticism 
has  built  about  you  and  gain  the  com- 
panionship it  hungers  for.  Sometimes  it 
forgets  for  a  moment  the  last  repulse — 
your  last  exposition  of  your  dogmas  and 
the  answers  I  write  you. 

Again  I  say  love  is  a  strange  creature 
[51] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

that  must  be  constantly  assured  of  the 
existence  of  its  other  half.  It  swoons  if 
not  fed  on  repetitious  sweet.  A  week 
passes  and  you  do  not  come  to  say  "I 
love  you."  Then  I  am  utterly  miserable. 
My  heart  is  heavy  and  I  walk  the  floor. 
But  you  come,  and  look  into  my  eyes, 
and  take  my  hand,  and  I  ask  with  gath- 
ering tears,  "Do  you  care  for  me?" 
"Love,  yes,"  you  answer,  drawing  me 
towards  you.  That  moment  I  think  I 
shall  never  doubt  again.  But  again  in  a 
long  separation  the  same  empty  ache  be- 
gins. I  must  have  you  near  or  be  miser- 
able. 

Three  times  this  morning  I  saw  you — 
as  you  hurriedly  walked  to  the  church  in 
cassock,  cloak,  and  berretta  at  nine 
o'clock;  when  you  went  to  intone  the 
half -past  ten  o'clock  mass ;  and  last  when 
you  came  in  through  the  December  rain 
to  your  twelve  o'clock  breakfast.  "Poor 
faint  priestling,"  I  said  to  myself,  "how 
he  abuses  his  poor  body,  all  for  a  lit- 
tle superstitious  observance!"  At  times 
[521 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

when  I  see  you  with  long  cloak  floating 
behind  as  you  walk  under  the  elms  to  the 
church,  comes  a  great  wish  to  be  one  of 
those  to  whom  your  doctrines  bring  com- 
fort— although  your  creed  would  to  my 
mind  be  intellectual  opium  rather  than 
courageous,  clear-eyed  faith  and  practice. 

If  I  were  a  Catholic  what  work  would 
the  church  find  for  me  to  do  ?  Would  it 
give  hearty  support  and  co-operation  to 
founding  and  equipping  a  woman's  col- 
lege, Catholic  inasmuch  as  its  religious 
observances  should  be  Catholic  ?  I  do  not 
mean  a  high  school,  whose  most  excellent 
virtue  is  mediocrity,  but  a  college  with 
aims  and  ideals  in  the  training  and  edu- 
cation of  women,  and  in  opportunities  for 
carrying  study  beyond  any  women's  col- 
lege now  established.  Singular  it  is  that 
the  Catholics  have  not  caught  up  the 
spirit  of  the  education  of  women  which 
has  become  so  supreme  among  us  Ameri- 
cans. You  plead  that  the  church  is  now 

too  poor  for  such  accomplishment.    That 
[53] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

cannot  be  the  real  reason.  The  church 
has  money  to  found  colleges  for  men; 
and  to  build  vast  cathedrals.  Why  they 
do  not  for  women  is  found  in  the  church's 
and  priests'  estimate  of  women. 

But  the  woman's  cause  is  man's.  What 
a  force  in  disintegrating  so-called  preju- 
dices, and  what  power  of  attraction  such 
a  college  generously  conducted  would  be! 
There  is  a  conviction  abroad  in  the  land 
that  the  priests  will  not  educate  Catholic 
women  because  they  know  their  power 
is  co-extensive  with  the  women's  igno- 
rance and  subordination. 

This  idea  of  a  college  for  women,  and 
of  superior  grade,  is  not  fanfare.  About 
it  I  have  of  late  thought  much.  Looking 
at  it  considerately  helps  one  to  see  the 
enormous  difficulties  one  would  have  to 
overcome,  and  the  almost  martyrdom  one 
would  suffer  who  had  the  movement  in 
hand.  It  would  mean  the  conversion  of 
a  majority  of  the  Catholics  to  estimates  of 
women's  dignity. 

When  I  say,  "If  I  were  a  Catholic,"  do 
[54] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

not  think  that  the  pleasure  of  upbuilding 
a  women's  college  could  change  my  faith 
contrary  to  my  convictions.  But  at  times 
the  question  seems  to  be  only  into  what 
terms  we  shall  translate  life — its  sen- 
sations, experiences,  and  conceptions; 
whether  the  scientific  and  truth-seeking, 
or  the  discursively  imaginative  and  ficti- 
tious. Even  with  your  submergence,  do 
you  not  ever  hesitate  and  question  if  the 
socialists  may  not  be  right  in  their  prop- 
agandism? — the  goodness  of  human  na- 
ture and  the  beneficence  to  society  and 
the  individual  of  his  total  expression, 
rather  than  the  old  theological  doctrine 
of  the  inherent  evil  of  ourselves  and  the 
need  of  its  suppression  and  extirpation 
through  asceticism  ?  But  in  all  this  ques- 
tion of  college  foundation  of  one  thing  I 
am  convinced — not  far  away  is  an  hour 
when  the  Catholic  Church  will  be  forced 
to  supply,  in  order  to  hold  its  own,  some 
poor  substitute  at  least  of  what  I  have 
hinted  at. 

[55] 


VIL 

Quhilk  was  not  words  and  babling  vaine, 
Bot  words   with  knawledge  joynd  certaine: 
Quhilk  in  her  life  she  did  expresse, 
By  doing  as  shee  did  professe. 

JOHN  DAVIDSON. 

IN  his  "Apologia  pro  Vita  Sua"  Newman 
shows  the  poorness  of  his  spirit  in  telling 
how  he  dwelt  upon  dogmatic  differences, 
and  hinged  the  salvation  of  his  soul  upon 
such  divergence.  Why,  instead,  did  he 
not  brood  over  the  hungry,  wretched 
hovel-dwellers  in  his  country,  and  base 
his  salvation  on  saving  their  souls — and 
bodies  ? 

Men  are  ever  more  and  more  uniting 
the  conceptions  of  God  and  of  Law — in 
this  they  are  approaching  with  upward 
motion  the  stand  of  the  dramas  of  Soph- 
ocles. Those  ancient  poetic  expressions 

of  the  modern  scientific  idea  are  the  sub- 
[56] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

limest  word  of  God-ruling  or  Law-ruling 
—whichever  you  will — the  sublimest 
word  of  the  modern  scientific  idea  that 
Law  is  "the  order  of  the  whole  re- 
garded as  a  process  of  unerringly  un- 
folded energy,"  as  Symonds  says,  and 
God  as  "that  same  order  contemplated 
by  human  thought  as  its  essence  mind- 
determined." 

When  I  see  the  Catholic  Church  ruling 
millions,  I  cannot  help  crying,  "Alas, 
what  is  man!"  I  sit  and  gaze  at  your 
church,  your  school,  and  I  am  filled  with 
wonder  that  enough  of  our  kind  can  be 
found  to  build  and  maintain  them.  Over 
our  broad  country  the  houses  they  are 
putting  up — to  what  use  will  they  be  put 
when  the  descendants  of  the  builders 
become  thoroughly  Americanised?  Will 
the  church  meet  them  half  way,  accom- 
modate itself  to  them,  and  teach  religion 
in  a  purer  form?  Or  will  it  dogmatise, 
Romanise,  papalise,  ultramontagnise  un- 
til its  adherents  who  have  mental  inde- 
pendence fall  away  ? 

[57] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

To  explain  this  madness  of  the  build- 
ers would  be  easier  if  yours  were  the  only 
like  institution  in  the  world.  You  might 
with  solitary  example  claim  special  and 
divine  sanction  and  protection.  But  there 
are  other  religions  just  as  rich — richer; 
just  as  old — older;  just  as  blessed  with 
stupefying  ceremonial,  dogmatic  theolo- 
gies, sacerdotal  exclusiveness,  self-vaunt- 
ing tradition,  and  deadness  to  scientific 
cleanliness — monasteries,  holy  orders, 
miracles,  saints,  and  shrines.  You  find 
them  in  India,  in  Thibet,  in  China.  Con- 
sider this.  But  you  will  take  refuge  in 
the  assertion  that  God  sent  the  false 
forms  to  make  way  for  your  true.  A 
most  infamous  God!  so  to  mislead  bil- 
lions of  human  finite  creatures,  if  that 
were  his  game. 

I 

How  can  they  call  themselves  "Catho- 
lic," that  word  meaning  universal,  and 
yet  nurse  so  narrow  a  church  prejudice 
that  they  avoid  as  far  as  possible  social 

intercourse  with  those  who  do  not  believe 

[58] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

their  dogmata?  The  Catholic  laity  even 
attack  priests  if,  forsooth,  they  associate 
with  non-Catholics.  Among  Christians, 
Protestantism  is  the  religion  of  action— 
to  do — to  achieve — to  accomplish;  Ca- 
tholicism the  religion  of  contemplation, 
inaction,  unachieving,  dreaming  life  away 
and  submitting,  ever  submitting.  George 
Moore  has  said  this  in  stronger  fashion. 
"Protestantism  is  strong,  clean,  and  west- 
ernly,  Catholicism  is  eunuch-like,  dirty, 
and  Oriental.  .  .  .  Yes,  Oriental;  there 
is  something  even  Chinese  about  it. 
What  made  England  great  was  Protest- 
antism, and  when  she  ceases  to  be  Prot- 
estant she  will  fall.  .  .  .  Look  at  the 
nations  that  have  clung  to  Catholicism, 
starving  moonlighters  and  starving  brig- 
ands. The  Protestant  flag  floats  on  every 
ocean  breeze,  the  Catholic  banner  hangs 
limp  in  the  incense  silence  of  the  Vatican. 
Let  us  be  Protestant  and  revere  Crom- 
well." 

But  God  is  preparing  a  mighty  ven- 
geance.    "Here,"  say  your  powers,  "to 
[59] 


A   WOMAN;S    HEART 

this  great,  teeming,  generous,  receptive 
America  we  shall  flee  for  refuge,  and 
there  shall  we  build  better  than  in  our 
seventy  years  of  Babylonian  Avignon." 
Time  and  occasion  answer  with  Mc- 
Glynns  and  other  recalcitrants  in  the 
first  quarter  century.  "I  defy  the  malig- 
nity of  Rome,"  said  Dr.  McGlynn  in 
1888.  "I  give  them  warning  now  that 
if  they  attempt  to  hound  me  with  the  arts 
of  which  they  are  such  masters,  I  will 
expose  them.  I  have  only  told  things 
which  politicians  and  well-informed  peo- 
ple have  known  in  the  past,  but  I  give 
them  warning  that  I  am  full  of  knowl- 
edge of  events,  the  tale  of  which  will 
make  the  country  too  hot  to  hold  them. 
They  had  better  let  me  alone." 

Such  men  are  amalgams  of  America 
and  Rome.  How  does  it  work?  Is  it  a 
success  ? 

Sweetheart,  your  dear  letter  of  "one 
and  a  half  lines"  here  as  I  got  home  just 
now.     All  the  way  I  was  dreaming  and 
[60] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

saying,  "How  can  I  make  him  know  he 
is  the  world  to  me?"  Oh,  my  very  life, 
if  you  could  only  see  me  as  I  am — your- 
self as  you  are — our  love  as  it  is  and 
should  be  in  the  future.  To-night  has 
much  to  be  said.  Shall  we  ever,  even  in 
an  eternity,  tell  what  we  would  ?  Shall 
we  ever  come  to  an  end  by  "the  golden 
bar  of  Heaven"  ? 

It  is  long  since  the  sentence  from  your 
lips,  "Yes,  I  must  see  you  again  this 
week."  My  heart  echoed  the  words,  and 
Thursday  morning  I  loitered,  hoping  to 
take  the  same  train  with  you.  Friday 
afternoon  I  watched  for  you  an  hour,  and 
Saturday  morning  and  afternoon  an  hour 
each  in  waiting.  Sunday  night  I  said  to 
my  heart,  "  Certainly  he  will  come." 

This  is  a  bit  of  the  external  history  of 
my  thought  for  you  since  you  were  here. 
This  terrible  strain  with  week  after  week 
of  mind  revolving  on  the  same  momen- 
tous question,  of  devising  ways  and 

means  only  to  have  them  torn  from  me — 
[61] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

is  it  all  to  be  for  naught?  Shall  I  lose 
you  at  last  ?  Why  do  I  persist  ?  I  do  not 
know  except  because  you  are  my  life.  I 
know  it  and  I  feel  it  every  moment. 
There  is  no  escape.  This  love  means  my 
destruction  unless  you  see  broadly  and 
love  deeply.  I  cannot  leave  you.  I  fly 
to  you  from  whatever  quarter,  as  the 
moth  flies  to  the  candle.  It  is  the  old 
likeness  but  the  true  one,  and  I  am 
singed  and  burned  and  bruised  and  lie 
worn  and  exhausted  where  I  have  fallen 
near  you. 

You  say  you  do  wrong  to  care  for  me, 
or  say  you  love  me — that  you  are  already 
married,  and  to  the  church,  and  made 
your  vows  to  her  long  ago.  If  you  love 
me  it  is  right  to  say  so.  God  would  not 
have  given  you  this  single  love  if  it  had 
not  been  right.  You  confess  it  broadens 
and  clarifies  your  thought  and  feelings— 
your  estimate  of  life.  Then  it  cannot  be 
bad. 

Give  a  writ  of  divorce  to  your  present 

spouse.    Your  ecclesiastical  court  will  not 
[62] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

do  it  for  you.  Then  take  it  into  your 
own  hands  for  yourself.  Follow  the  cus- 
tom of  Rome,  of  a  Rome  more  ancient 
but  of  a  paganism  similar  to  your  twen- 
tieth century,  renovated  city's.  Go  back 
to  the  habit  that  pertained  in  ancient 
time  of  putting  away  your  wife  and  tak- 
ing another.  Leave  the  church,  my  very 
soul,  and  marry  me.  It  is  a  horrible  oc- 
topus gigans  you  are  serving,  which  every 
year  catches  hundreds  of  men  in  its  ter- 
rible suckers — and  you  above  all.  I  hate 
it.  I  hate  a  monstrosity  that  forces  men 
to  lead  unnatural  lives,  and  hence  im- 
moral lives.  And  it  keeps  you  from  me. 

It  is  now  half-past  three  this  Friday 
morning,  and  with  hour  after  hour  of 
sleeplessness  upon  eyelids  I  sit  here  in 
the  cool  air  to  say  once  more  that  I  think 
ever  of  you  with  the  same  strong  love. 
This  night  I  have  turned  in  mind  again 
and  again  the  whole  tragedy  of  our  meet- 
ing. I  have  thought  what  you  have  done 

and  said  through  these  shuffling  months 
[63] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  years.  How  can  I  make  you  see  that 
our  love,  if  rightly  followed,  is  the  best  of 
your  life  and  mine? — that  it  is  your  and 
my  right  life.  If  you  had  been  here  these 
last  two  hours  I  know  I  could  have  made 
you  see  it — I  have  felt  so  strongly  the 
desire  to  show  it  to  you.  But  now  I  am 
too  exhausted  to  write  out  the  thinking. 
And  this  coming  day  will  pass  as  hun- 
dreds of  days  have  sped.  And  you  will  be 
driven  by  an  infinitude  of  little  masters; 
and  I  shall  be  drowned  in  care  and  anx- 
ieties which  press  grievously.  And  all 
that  has  been  throbbing  in  my  poor  head 
will  be  as  the  works  of  the  Pharaohs  are. 
I  looked  at  my  watch  at  half -past  twelve 
and  said,  "Is  he  talking  with  his  friends 
now?"  I  have  been  to  the  dining-room 
for  bread,  and  I  am  going  to  ask  your  aid 
to  sleep.  Come,  be  near  me.  Press  my 
hand  and  kiss  my  forehead.  tQ 


<TOUf 


[64] 


VIII. 

She  inheriting  from  many 
Bleeding  mothers  bleeding  sense, 
Feels  'twixt  her  and  sharp-fanged  nature 
Honour  first  did  plant  the  fence. 

GEORGE  MEREDITH. 

MARRIED  life  as  one  commonly  sees  it  I 
have  thought  impossible — to  live  with  a 
husband  as  I  have  seen  women  living  with 
their  spouses.  But  now! — I  say,  if  I 
could  only  live  with  you  under  the  stupid- 
est conditions,  in  plain  Philistine  fashion, 
simply  and  frugally  getting  our  bread 
and  eating  it  at  our  own  fireside — if  I 
could  live  with  you  in  that  way  it  would 
be  heaven.  So  to  go  on  year  after  year, 
with  our  children — our  children — God's 
children,  my  better  life,  yours  and  mine, 
growing  about  us — to  watch  for  you,  to 

care  for  you  in  the  tenderest  way — that 
5  [65] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

would  be  enough.  Is  it  a  dream  so  beau- 
tiful we  shall  never  realize  it  ? 

If  you  should  be  with  me  only  a  week 
you  would  see  clearly.  No  more  moral 
myopia.  You  would  marvel  that  you 
could  have  thought  of  living  away  from 
me,  and  one  day  you  would  kiss  me  and 
tell  thanks  for  my  taking  you  by  the  hand 
and  leading  you  to  broader  conceptions 
of  conduct.  Can  you  not  see  what  the 
world  holds  for  us? — so  much  sweetness 
and  beauty  if  we  are  together.  The  diffi- 
cult bitterness  that  is  over  us  now  would 
then  have  vanished. 

How  strange  it  would  be! — no  longer 
peering  down  the  long  avenue  to  see  the 
light  in  your  window  and  thinking  of 
you  clad  in  cassock  and  mouthing  your 
breviary,  but  sitting  with  you  by  our 
own  fire,  clasping  your  hand  and  hearing 
the  sweetness  of  your  voice.  You  should 
read  aloud  from  Keats  and  Sophocles, 
Dante,  Thomas  a  Kempis,  Emerson, 
Clough,  Arnold,  Shelley,  and  the  Gospels 

— our   hearts   would   welcome   messages 
[66] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

from  all  brave,  strong,  true  souls — while 
I  should  count  your  linen,  stiffen  the 
fastenings  of  your  buttons,  and  pick  up 
the  dropped  threads  of  your  stockings. 
You,  too,  have  fancied  it  all  ?  And  was 
it  fair?  Your  mouth  quivers  and  eyes 
shine.  "Fair? "you  say.  Then  why  not 
make  it  real  ? 

The  best  place  in  the  world  would  be  my 
seat  by  your  side.  I  feel  you  now  strok- 
ing my  hair.  Your  touch  magnetises  and 
makes  me  helpless.  But  I  should  be 
helpful,  if  the  way  were  open  to  go  to 
you  at  any  time  and  lay  my  hand  upon 
your  forehead.  Such  freedom  would  in- 
crease my  strength.  It  is  your  remote- 
ness now  that  wears  me  away. 

No  man  I  know  but  would  glory  in  such 
love  as  I  have  for  you.  It  is  worshipful. 
It  would  enwrap  and  protect  you.  It 
would  bring  you  all  that  is  best.  And  it 
would  yield  to  you  as  it  longs  for  and 
seeks  you.  Its  supremest  desire  would 
be  your  desire,  and  its  greatest  work 

would  be  your  life  made  perfect  in  right- 
[67] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

thinking,  right-feeling,  and  right-doing. 
We  should  be  more  happy  than  any 
tongue  or  pen  can  tell.  To  have  you  al- 
ways near  to  go  to,  to  speak  to,  to  touch 
and  to  love  as  I  would — I  dare  not  dwell 
on  it.  Fire  flames  along  my  veins  at  the 
thought  of  such  freedom  and  unrestraint. 

Do  you  remember  one  evening  when  I 
wore  a  low  bodice,  how  you  bade  me  good- 
night with  a  pressure  of  your  hand- 
then,  when  your  eye  rested  a  moment  on 
my  neck,  you  started  as  if  swayed  by 
great  pain  and  caught  me  in  your  arms 
crying,  "  Oh,  love,  love,  can  God  torture 
me  so!"  And  you  pushed  down  the  dress 
and  buried  your  face  as  a  man  dying  of 
thirst  would  sink  his  face  to  a  fountain. 
I  could  not  speak.  I  could  not  be  angry, 
/for  great  love  was  in  my  heart  and  in  its 
eyes  you  did  no  harm. 

When  other  men  have  talked  to  me  of 
love  I  have  been  moved  for  them,  won- 
dered what  I  had  done  to  put  them 
in  such  grievous  strait,  and  pondered 

whether  or  no  it  were  my  'duty  to  marry 
[68] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  help  the  sufferer  out.  But  never  was 
one  thought  like  the  pulsing,  panting 
passion  which  now  measures  my  days, 
which  will  never  leave  me  but  consume 
me  or  strengthen  me — as  we  are  married 
or  not — until  I  drop  into  the  grave.  And 
shall  this  be  my  life's  growth?  Only 
writ  in  water  because  the  strong  finger  of 
fate  was  upon  you  and  therefore  upon 
me? 

One  of  your  charms  is  that  you  are 
unbitten  by  the  poisonous  tooth  of  the 
world.  There  is  about  you  the  serenity 
of  the  cloister.  But  you  mistake  me.  I 
do  not  hate  your  church.  I  love  its  aes- 
thetic qualities  for  your  sake.  But  I 
loathe  its  enslaving  superstitions  and  grip 
upon  humanity,  and  I  cannot  see  that  it 
is  divine.  Rather  in  its  degradation  of 
men  it  is  satanic.  I  struggle  to  do  it  jus- 
tice. I  have  made  my  mind  as  entirely  as 
possible  a  tabula  rasa  for  you  to  write 
thereon  new  convictions.  But  neither 
what  you  have  said,  nor  the  books  you 
have  given  me  to  read,  have  had  truth  or 
[69] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

force  enough  to  bring  one  primary  prin- 
ciple. Vaudeville,  in  a  measure,  it  seems 
to  me — something  more  than  half  funny 
by  which  the  actors  get  snug  berths  and 
good  living  in  return  for  self-stultifica- 
tion, and  hocus-pocussing  the  masses. 

In  your  very  foundation  principle  you 
start  out  with  a  pun — Tu  es  Petrus,  et 
super  hanc  petram  sedificabo  meam  eccle- 
siam;  or  if  you  wish  it  in  the  possible 

WOrds  Of  JeSUS ^   £?  nirpoyt  xat  Ir}  -aorrj  ry 

nlrpa  o!zo8ofj.yffio  fj.ou  Trtv  £xxJ.rjff{av,      \Vhat  is  the 

turn  upon  Petrus  and  petra — Peter  and 
rock — but  a  pun?  What  tremendous 
import  that  pun  has  had  in  the  history  of 
the  world! — whether  it  was  genuinely 
said  by  Jesus,  or  is  merely  an  interpola- 
tion of  later  times. 

I  should  like  to  be  of  your  theology,  I 
say.  The  faith  would  bring  me  into  un- 
derstanding and  accord  with  you.  But  I 
cannot  think  the  untrue,  true.  I  cannot 
do  as  you  are  doing,  constantly  draw 
lines  about  myself  and  prescribe  my 

thoughts.    God  meant  no  one  to  do  that. 
[70] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

The  truth,  the  truth,  the  truth  we  should 
seek  and  follow.  By  truth  only  can  we  go 
forward.  "  Veracity,"  some  one  has  said, 
"veracity  is  the  vital  force  of  human 
progress."  But  I  should  like  to  be  of 
your  faith  because  in  that  way  I  could 
come  nearer  to  you  and  feel  more  and 
more  like  you. 

But  here  is  one  of  our  differences. 
Your  universality — that  is,  your  Catholi- 
cism— teaches  that  naturalism  is  to  be 
despised,  that  the  worshipful  is  the  super- 
natural, a  wilful  and  capricious  exhibi- 
tion of  the  power  of  God  to  test  the  cre- 
dulity of  men — the  incoming  of  himself 
in  some  wafer  or  wax  image  of  human 
construction  and  evincing  no  benefac- 
tive  power  in  that  incoming,  merely  a 
miraculous.  My  universality — that  is,  my 
Catholicism — teaches  that  nature  is  wor- 
shipful as  an  expression  and  unfolding  of 
immutable  law  though  millions  of  years, 
that  that  law  is  as  active  now  as  in  the 
past,  and  is  an  exhibition  of  the  power  and 

presence  of  one  spiritual  being  of  which 
[71] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

all  that  is  real  is  the  activity  or  expression ; 
that  we  are  related  to  this  spiritual  being 
not  only  as  parts  of  nature  but  also  as 
partakers  in  some  measure  of  the  self- 
consciousness  through  which  it  distin- 
guishes itself  in  the  world — and  that  in 
this  partaking  we  have  our  spiritual  life. 
You  say  those  things  of  yours  which  we 
call  supernatural  are  natural  to  God's 
works  and  will  some  day  be  explained. 
But  why  keep  men  so  many  centuries  in 
the  dark?  The  superstructure  that  the 
prelacy  of  centuries  has  reared  upon  the 
sometimes  true  and  sometimes  factitious 
works — upon  things  the  result  of  truth 
and  things  the  result  of  morbidness 
— your  laws  and  rules  and  authorita- 
tive assumptions — these  are  revolting  to 
thinking  minds.  How  absurd,  for  in- 
stance, for  an  old  bigwig  in  Rome  to 
grant  Mary  Howitt — who  donned  the 
Catholic  theological  coat  in  the  doting 
years  of  decayed  emotion  and  sentiment 
and  not  during  the  keen  strength  of  her 

intellect — how  absurd  for  some  prelate 
[72] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

to  grant  that  her  poor  old  bones  be  laid 
in  the  Protestant  churchyard  beside  her 
husband's.  Why,  with  that  husband  she 
had  spent  more  than  fifty  years  of  mar- 
ried life !  Such  pretension  nauseates.  It 
is  akin  to  the  church's  saying  you  shall 
not  marry  me,  and  it  brings  to  mind  my 
sentence  which  angered  you  the  other 
day:  "The  morality  of  your  church  is  not 
the  morality  of  God." 

But  now  it  is  time  for  your  service,  and 
whenever  I  think  it  is  time  I  hasten  to  my 
window  to  peer  far  down  the  sloping 
lawn  and  see  you  round  the  curves  and 
corners  of  the  walk  to  the  vestry.  Some- 
times you  turn  your  face  to  our  windows 
and  mount  the  steps  and  pause  with  your 
hand  upon  the  door.  The  sun  strikes  you 
full  in  front,  and  reddens  and  gilds 
your  velvet  berretta  and  long  cloak  and 
wraps  you  in  love — an  unpardonable 
familiarity  in  the  sun. 

There  is  no  better  test  of  the  love  of  a 
woman  who  is  not  of  your  faith  than  to 

see  you  in  priestly  vestments.    Such  trap- 
[73] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

pings  demean  a  man  in  her  eyes.  Any 
other  occupation,  she  says,  would  be  more 
manly  than  this  of  trading  on  the  cre- 
dulity of  the  unfortunate  and  undevel- 
oped of  our  kind. 


[74] 


IX. 

The  voice  of  my  beloved!  behold,  he  cometh  leaping 
upon  the  mountains,  skipping  upon  the  hills. 

My  beloved  is  like  a  roe,  or  a  young  hart;  behold, 
he  standeth  behind  our  wall,  he  looketh  forth  at  the 
windows,  showing  himself  through  the  lattice. 

My  beloved  spake,  and  said  unto  me,  "Rise  up,  my 
love,  my  fair  one,  and  come  away." 

The  Song  of  Solomon. 

You  cannot  submit  to  it.  You  shall 
not.  It  tortures  me;  it  makes  me  writhe. 
I  feel  an  imprisoned  lioness  who  pierces 
heaven  with  her  cries.  Leave  it,  dear 
heart,  leave  the  church  so  far  as  the 
council  of  Trent  and  its  kindred  speak. 
Have  the  moral  courage  to  stand  by  me, 
your  life  and  freer  soul.  You  shall  still 
be  a  Catholic  after  you  are  married. 
Other  men  have  done  what  you  hesitate 
over.  There  are  liberal  men  and  women 

in  our  land  who  will  uphold  you.     And 
[75] 


A  WOMAN'S  HEART 

your  overseers,  the  bishops,  would  in  the 
end  recognise  your  good  works. 

Some  ecclesiastical  organisation  is  nec- 
essary, you  say,  and  why  not  this  one? 
Not  this  because  of  the  remains  in  it  of 
power-worship  and  the  abuse  of  power, 
and  also  because  of  the  remnants  of  igno- 
rance and  the  superstition  and  barbarous 
practices  that  have  weight  in  its  precepts. 
Take,  for  instance,  the  ceremony  of  ordi- 
nation. I  shudder  when  I  think  of  you 
going  through  the  hideous  play,  of  your 
so  far  forgetting  your  manhood  as  to  fall 
prone  upon  your  face  before  the  church's 
power,  the  myth  of  sacerdotalism.  It  is 
servile,  not  free  and  noble  and  lofty- 
minded,  to  rig  up  in  theatrical  trappings 
and  go  through  theatrical  antics.  It  were 
bad  if  it  were  extravaganza.  But  with 
you  it  was  honest  reality.  At  the  cere- 
mony the  other  day  the  sobs  of  the  old 
women  told  me  their  simple  conviction. 
In  their  convulsive  breath  I  could  see 
what  your  abnegation  was  when  you  were 

"consecrated." 

[76] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

That  institution  in  which  the  faults  and 
foibles  and  weaknesses  of  humanity  may 
best  be  studied  is  the  Catholic  church,  its 
rules  and  doctrines.  There  the  poor, 
quivering  creature,  man,  is  to  be  seen  in 
his  weakest  and  most  abject  moments. 
There  he  stands  naked  before  the  un- 
known powers  of  life  and  terrified  by  the 
hobgoblins  the  church  has  reared.  Its 
rules  and  accommodations  are  fitted  to 
him  and  for  him  by  cunningest  skill,  as 
the  intaglio  fits  the  relief,  or  as  the  plaster 
is  formed  by  the  lines  and  seams  and  hair 
and  character  of  the  dead  man's  face. 
And  like  the  death-mask  it  is  the  cast  by 
which  the  weakness  and  ills  and  pitiful 
record  of  the  impotence  of  men  are  pre- 
served and  handed  down. 

Marvellous  it  is  that  you  do  not  your- 
self rebel  at  the  ceremonials  of  the  church, 
they  are  so  evidently  built  to  overcome 
the  imagination  and  subvert  the  reason 
by  meretricious  graces.  "We  do  this," 
you  say,  "because  it  symbolises  such  and 

such  divine  or  virtuous  action."     "And 
[77] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

we  do  that  because  it  signifies  so  and  so." 
But  in  the  repeated  using  you  lose  the  es- 
sence, and  symbol  stands  alone — not  in 
one  case  in  ten  thousand  does  anything 
but  the  symbol  remain. 

The  zodiacal  light  is  in  the  western  sky 
and  the  willows  are  pushing  up  their 
feather  tips  in  the  gloaming  and  pointing 
at  the  evening  star.  Does  the  star  shine 
down  upon  you  in  your  study,  dear 
heart  ?  And  what  does  it  find  you  doing  ? 
Ah,  if  Daphne-like  I  could  become  the 
willow;  or  shine  a  tiny  crescent  in  the 
brilliant  western  light.  But  alas !  my  feet 
hold  fast  to  the  earth. 

Words  cannot  say  how  I  regret  having 
missed  you  this  afternoon.  All  day  and 
all  night  I  have  thought  of  you  and  longed 
for  you — I  cannot  tell  you  how  much  I 
have  longed,  and  what  I  have  thought. 
It  has  been  one  of  those  times  when  my 
soul  is  stirred  and  talks  without  ceasing 
to  your  soul. 

"My  soul  this  hour  has  drawn  your  soul 
A  little  nearer  yet." 
[78] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

Have  you  not  heard  ?  When  I  awoke  this 
morning  I  said,  "I  shall  see  him  to-day." 
Bitterness  could  not  be  in  my  heart  when 
it  is  given  me  to  look  upon  your  face 
within  twenty -four  hours.  But  even 
when  you  do  not  come,  I  hold  converse 
with  you  here  alone  in  my  room  every 
hour  of  the  day.  I  take  you  in  my  arms 
and  brood  over  you  as  a  mother  takes  her 
child,  and  I  listen  to  the  echoes  of  your 
voice  and  forget  the  world  and  pain  and 
sorrow.  At  such  moments  I  live.  Think 
of  being  by  you  so  that  I  could  pass  my 
hand  down  the  bare  strength  of  your  arm. 
I  should  swoon  with  delight.  Pray  God 
it  may  be.  "Deus  vult  rogari,  vult  cogi, 
vult  quadam  importunitate  vinci,"  cries 
Saint  Gregory.  So  I  shall  at  last  conquer 
God  by  a  certain  importunity. 

How  foolish  of  you  to  ask  if  it  is  a  con- 
solation to  be  with  you!  To  be  with  you 
— is  life.  To  be  without  you  is  heart- 
ache and  longing  and  pain.  Can  you  not 
realise  ?  How  can  I  tell  you  other  than 

by  iteration  and  every  act  that  would  con- 

[79] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

f ess  it  ?  You  do  not  know  what  I  feel  for 
you — you  surely  do  not.  In  your  remote- 
ness you  seem  at  times  like  some  one 
who  is  dead.  I  look  at  little  furnishings, 
such  as  pictures  and  vases,  and  say,  "  He 
liked  that,"  or  "He  saw  it  so  and  I  will 
not  change  it." 

Are  you  sitting  far  away  beyond  the 
trees  and  wishing,  too  ?  It  is  nearly  seven 
o'clock.  You  must  be.  Ah,  if  you  were 
here!  I  long  for  you  with  tears.  How 
distant  you  are!  And  see  the  travail  we 
must  undergo  before  you  are  here  to 
stay.  The  thought  pierces  one's  very 
heart.  Men  and  women  about  us  are 
happy  in  each  other.  But  no  one  of  them 
has  for  the  other  such  love  as  mine  is 
for  you,  the  all-embracing,  all-sacrificing, 
all-worshipful  love.  Is  it  right  that  we 
should  be  so  tortured  and  denied  ?  Love 
is  the  best  of  goods  and  God  never  meant 
otherwise  than  that  we  should  have  each 
other  in  sweetness  and  contentment  all 
our  life  long.  Men  and  their  falsities 

have  divided  us.    They  shall  not 

[80] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

So  far  I  had  written  down  when  there 
sounded  a  familiar  step.  You  glanced  at 
my  window  and  did  not  see  me.  Again 
you  looked  and  smiled — the  dear  mouth 
—and  raised  your  hat  and  passed.  My 
pulses  are  once  more  growing  calm.  Now 
you  are  far  on  your  road  homeward. 
And  I  want  you  here.  I  want  you  here. 
I  want  you  here.  But  fate  may  mean  to 
grind  me  to  a  powder  and  have  put  you 
to  turn  the  wheel. 

Many  times  to-day  the  question  has 
come  to  me  what  aptitude,  or  liking,  or 
predilection  you  may  have  for  what  sci- 
ence? How  do  you  think?  It  is  to  be 
sweet  and  kind  and  calm,  I  know,  and 
therefore  it  is  to  be  wholly  humanita- 
rian? I  would  talk  with  you  of  this,  but 
your  manner  checks  me.  Is  it  because 
that  deep  in  your  soul  you  know  you  can 
never  free  yourself  from  your  present 
powers  ? 

The  sunlight  is  sinking  out  of  the  west- 
ern horizon.  The  elms  are  swaying  and 

thick  white  clouds  are  hurrying  across  the 
6  [81] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

blue  vault  above.  It  is  very  beautiful. 
Consciousness  of  God  creeps  in  the  heart. 
The  little  winds  moving  the  leaves  are  the 
little  affairs  of  life.  But  now  and  then  a 
strong  gust,  straight  from  the  sea  and 
bearing  its  burden  of  salt,  bends  the 
branches  in  long  sweeps  and  starts  the 
robin  on  his  perch — such  are  the  great 
perturbations  of  life  that  test  our  strength 
to  yield  and  rise  again.  And  we  shall 
rise. 


[82] 


X. 

O  how  can  love's  eye  be  true, 
That  is  so  vex'd  with  watching  and  with  tears  ? 

SHAKESPEARE 

YOUR  mother  has  been  dead  these  many 
years? — since  before  you  began  your 
studies  ?  Ah,  dear  love,  if  she  were  on 
earth  I  should  put  my  arms  about  her  and 
kiss  her  for  bringing  you  into  the  world, 
for  giving  me  the  greatest  gift  one  woman 
can  bring  another.  She  must  have  been 
a  simple-minded,  devout  little  creature, 
a  sonsie  Irish  lass,  of  round  figure,  danc- 
ing blue  eyes  and  a  string  of  beads  always 
in  pocket.  My  heart  warms  toward  her 
when  I  look  on  you — out  of  sheer  admi- 
ration and  love  and  pity  for  you  and  her. 
She  loved  her  children,  you  said.  Here 
now  are  passing  little  children  going  in 
the  rain  to  their  first  communion,  and 
[83] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

clad  in  white  and  the  gladness  and  ex- 
citement and  holiday  with  which  youth 
approaches  steps  to  maturity.  I  wonder 
does  the  absurdity  of  church  rule  as  com- 
pared with  nature  never  strike  the  little 
creatures  ?  Some  of  them  look  pale  and 
faint.  It  is  long  past  their  breakfast 
hour.  They  are  hungry  and  thirsty.  If 
I  were  one  of  them  do  you  know  how 
recalcitrant  I  should  be?  I  should  run 
out  in  this  pure,  sweet  rain  and  open  my 
mouth  and  thrust  out  my  tongue  to  catch 
the  drops,  and  say  God  sent  the  rain 
much  more  than  the  beprayed  wafer  the 
priest  would  put  upon  it. 

Again  you  mistake  my  attitude  toward 
your  rites.  If  they  did  not  narrow  and 
dwarf  the  lives  of  thousands,  I  should  not 
disesteem  them.  If  they  were  harmless 
why  should  I  oppose?  They  are  full  of 
harm.  They  put  silly,  debilitating  ritual 
in  the  place  of  honest  conduct.  An  in- 
stance is  in  the  woman  who  has  maligned 
me.  I  do  not  know  her.  I  did  not  know 

of  her  existence  until  the  gossip-monger- 
[84] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

ing  of  her  tongue  came  to  my  ears.  She 
has  given  evidence  the  angels  would  not 
question  that  she  has  a  black  heart  full  of 
malignant  jealousy.  She  lies  about  you 
and  me.  But  she  goes  through  all  the 
church's  forms  and  frequently  visits  a 
confessor — at  some  distance,  because  she 
hates  you.  Then  she  comes  to  you  next 
morning  for  you  to  put  your  consecrated 
wafer  —  your  God  —  upon  her  serpent 
tongue.  And  you  do  as  she  wills  all  the 
time  her  heart  is  burning  in  hatred.  Do 
not  these  facts  shock  you?  Not  once 
have  they  come,  but  time  after  time.  Her 
jealousy  and  vindictiveness  are  raging, 
her  mouth  is  lying,  and  you  go  on  placing 
your  God-wafer  within  the  thorny  hedge 
of  her  teeth. 

These  are  some  of  the  practical  out- 
workings  of  your  rules  and  superstitions. 
Do  they  not  make  you  most  miserable? 
— make  us  both  most  miserable  in  our 
separated  lives  ?  Yesterday  I  saw  a  sad 
and  solitary  figure  going  along  the  road- 
side. And  after  a  little  the  sad  and 
[85] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

solitary  figure  came  back.  This  they  do 
also. 

And  yet  you  persist.  How  can  a  hu- 
man being,  having  come  to  man's  estate, 
cling  to  and  have  faith  in  the  mummeries 
and  droning  ?  It  is  because  of  their  hyp- 
notic effect  in  childhood.  No  stronger 
comment  upon,  or  proof  of,  the  effect  of 
environment  in  the  forming  of  men  and 
women  can  be  found.  You  really  do  not 
believe  them.  Real  faith  puts  its  belief 
into  practice.  Upon  the  earth  to-day 
there  is  no  real  faith  in  the  whole  teach- 
ings of  Jesus.  To  safeguard  itself  the 
church  has  built  ritual.  This  life  with  its 
secret  questionings  and  unfathomable 
mysteries  men  cannot  solve,  and  they  are 
thus  terrified  into  submission  and  fetich- 
ism.  Alas,  the  short-sightedness  and  little 
faith  of  our  kind ! 

Two  years  ago  to-day  I  first  spoke  to 
you.  Two  years,  two  years — think  of  it! 
Do  you  remember  how  you  stood  in  cas- 
sock that  warm  summer  night?  Your 

eyes  gleamed  in  the  dark  light  under  the 
[86] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

elms,  and  we  raised  the  fallen  child.  I 
saw  your  figure  and  poise  of  head  and 
heard  your  rich,  coaxing  voice  with  such 
confusion  of  blood  that  I  could  with  diffi- 
culty help  the  little  one.  I  could  but  watch 
you  and  feel  how  ineffably  beautiful  you 
were. 

"I  did  not  choose  thee,  dearest, 
It  was  Love  that  made  the  choice,  not  I." 

others  have,  we  ask  so  little — first,  you 
And  now,  in  comparison  with  what 
whom  I  love  to  love  me,  and  second,  op- 
portunity to  work  and  earn  our  liveli- 
hood. Will  it  ever  be  ?  I  look  into  great 
business  houses,  into  schools  and  insti- 
tutions, and  even  in  the  crowded  street 
almost  cry  aloud,  "Have  you  no  room 
where  two  aching  hearts  may  earn  their 
daily  sustenance?"  But  fate  gives  us 
neither  gift.  To  keep  stout-hearted  is 
hard.  If  there  were  a  third  to  whom  we 
might  speak! — from  whom  we  might 
seek  counsel! 

But  again  when  I  asked  you  this  morn- 
[87] 


ing  to  tell  me  one  sweet  thing  in  way  of 
farewell  after  all  the  bitter  slavery  you 
had  confessed,  you  looked  in  my  eyes 
and  smiled  and  said,  "  I  love  you."  What 
do  you  think  I  then  said  to  myself  ?  "Is 
this  aught  that  is  good,  honourable,  or 
beautiful?  Has  it  been  in  the  past? 
Will  it  be  in  the  future?  Will  you  not 
always  be  sacrificed  to  the  church  ?  True 
love  demands  marriage.  That  is  its  sole 
fulfilment.  Without  marriage  it  is  naught 
—or  a  sin  and  burden.  He  tells  me  he 
cannot  marry  me,  and  in  the  next  breath 
looks  at  me  with  laughing  eyes  and  kiss- 
ing mouth,  and  whispers,  *I  love  you.' 
Which  way  shall  I  turn?  Whither  shall 
I  run?" 

A  cave  in  Dakota  would  mean  free- 
dom. Or  the  bare,  bold  mountains  of 
New  Mexico,  with  their  sandy  cactus 
plains  and  atmosphere  of  electric  clarity. 
But  to  New  Mexico  we  must  not  go. 
There  is  the  church,  the  hideous  engine 
of  your  torture — of  my  torture — of  our 
torture.  There  are  the  church's  hideous 
[88] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

penitentes  and  its  ignorant  masses,  its 
cactus  flagellants  and,  above  all,  its  abso- 
lutism, dogmatism,  and  satanic  disdain. 


C0 


Love,  love! 

I  cry  as  I  look  from  my  window 
And  see  your  form  in  the  distance; 

Dear  love! 

I  moan  as  I  wake  in  the  night 
And  watch  the  long  hours  through; 

Dear  love, 

In  sun  and  rain  weather,  in  harvest, 
In  sweet  springing  time  ever  dearer; 

Love  of  my  soul  ! 

Is  my  heart's  cry  —  God 
Knows  it,  sweet  —  for  you. 

IT  comes  in  great  waves.  It  shakes  me, 
submerges  and  swallows  me.  It  is  much 
greater  than  I  —  as  much  greater  as  the 
sum  of  all  life  is  greater  than  I.  I  cannot 
hope  to  express  it  except  in  Ipving  you 
and  becoming  you  forever.  I  am  help- 
less and  powerless  before  it.  It  is  some- 
thing outside  of  the  human  that  is  within 
you.  I  see  it  and  feel  it.  So  I  love  you  — 
[89] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

every  atom  just  as  you  are.  Your  hand, 
your  touch,  your  flesh — they  are  not  like 
others.  They  are  the  fabled  lotus.  I 
forget  the  world,  old  ways,  old  faiths,  the 
past  and  future — when  you  are  by. 

"  I  love  you,  I  love  you,"  I  hear  you  say. 
And  I  love  you.  If  fine  children  are  born 
to  parents  who  love  beyond  all  powers 
and  denials,  and  have  suffered  long  before 
at  last  they  are  given  each  other,  how 
lovely  of  character  and  fair  of  body 
should  our  dear  children  be!  I  think  of 
them  and  yearn  over  the  poor  unborn, 
and  mourn  my  impenetrable  desolation 
and  the  gift  of  motherhood — I  yearn  for 
a  child  who  shall  have  your  sweetness 
and  beauty  of  soul  and  body. 

Oh,  dear  love,  you  know  not  what  you 
are  to  me : 

Life,  and 

Health,  and 

Strength,  and 

Joy,  and 

Hope,  and 

all  that  is  beautiful  and  sweet  and  pre- 
[90] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

cious  in  this  world  or  in  any  possible  here- 
after. My  heart  aches  with  emptiness, 
and  my  whole  soul  cries  out  for  you 


[91] 


XL 

For    Weakness,    in    freedom,    grows    stronger    than 

Strength  with  a  chain; 
And  Error,  in  freedom,  will  come  to  lamenting  his 

stain, 
Till  freely  repenting  he  whiten  his  spirit  again. 

SIDNEY  LANIER. 

I  KNOW  what  the  verdict  will  be  if  you 
argue  my  case  without  my  presence. 
Your  church  for  many  centuries  tried  and 
condemned  without  affording  the  accused 
either  counsel  or  defence.  It  will  be  what 
it  always  has  been.  I  shall  be  con- 
demned. 

Oh,  if  you  were  only  an  American!  If 
you  only  understood  the  true  American 
spirit  of  personal  liberty  you  could  not 
be  enslaved  nor  believe  your  belief.  It 
is  not  liberty  but  license?  Why  quarrel 

over  a  word  ?    Call  it  license  if  you  choose 
[92] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

— but  in  doing  so  you  debase  your  Ameri- 
canism. Without  this  "license"  for 
which  millions  of  your  faithful  volun- 
tarily leave  their  native  land,  what  would 
their  condition  be?  If  it  were  not  for 
this  "license,"  would  they  not — the  Irish, 
the  Italians — be  over  in  Europe  living  the 
old  starved  life?  We  came  here  and 
made  the  liberty;  you  come  here  to  enjoy 
its  benefits  and  then  tear  it  down.  Our 
"license"  allows  your  faith  a  new  foot- 
hold, and  your  church  the  chance  to  pro- 
long its  breath.  That  you  call  freedom 
"license"  is  evidence  that  you  do  not 
understand  its  origin,  its  condition  to-day, 
or  its  meaning  at  any  time — nor  the  aw- 
ful cost  of  founding  it  here. 

With  the  undeveloped  moral  sense 
among  your  peoples,  and  resulting  from 
your  teachings,  freedom  degenerates  into 
license.  But  our  discipline — that  which 
you  call  Protestant — is  self-discipline,  a 
strength  which  is  possible  only  through 
the  utmost  freedom.  You  maintain  the 
religious  ceremonial  of  the  thirteenth 
[93] 


A  WOMAN'S    HEART 

century,  lacking  the  faith  and  religious 
fire  which  then  made  it  a  force  in  the 
world.  You  have  no  genuine  freedom. 
You  do  not  know  what  it  is.  You  are 
trained  in  no  sense  of  self -direction.  That 
is  impossible  with  the  confessional  ham- 
pering you — the  confessional  of  which 
the  whole  idea  is  hateful  to  liberty. 

Can  you  not  see  the  power  of  the  church 
is  immoral,  in  the  confessional  both  in 
relation  to  penitent  and  confessor?  The 
priest  vows  he  will  not  reveal  secrets  told 
him  in  the  confessional.  Thus  he  unites 
with  the  criminal  in  keeping  crime  secret 
from  the  civic  authorities.  By  his  pledges 
to  his  supreme  power  he  stands  against 
the  government  of  any  and  all  countries 
where  he  may  live.  The  power  of  the 
church  is  therefore  a  license  to  crime. 
And  privately  upon  the  penitent  the  effect 
is  immoral.  The  penalty  of  wrong-doing 
is  suffering,  but  the  church  intervenes 
and  protects  the  perpetrator  of  the  crime. 

Tell    the    archbishop    that    you    will 

marry,  and  that  it  is  I  whom  you  will 
[94] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

marry.  Nowadays,  in  this  country  of 
liberty,  he  cannot  starve  you  in  a  dun- 
geon. At  most  he  will  say  you  are  crazy, 
and  possibly  try  to  shut  you  up.  That  is 
a  method  they  have,  I  notice.  It  is  owing 
to  what  you  call  our  "license"  that  they 
couldn't  bury  you  in  a  subterranean  cell. 

Ay,  ay.  There  you  have  it.  You  are 
always  crying  "I  cannot,"  "I  cannot." 
I  am  always  saying  "I  will,"  "I  will." 
You  suffer  an  atrophy  of  the  will,  an 
apathy  of  the  desires  and  volition. 

You  sit  in  judgment  on  God.  The  in- 
finite and  ineffable  Good  of  the  world 
runs  to  love  as  the  sunbeams  spring  from 
the  sun.  God  gave  you  your  loving  na- 
ture and  affectionate  impulses,  the  will 
and  judgment  of  a  complete  and  perfect 
man.  You  put  before  your  God-given 
nature  and  the  manliest  impulses  of  our 
race — the  primal  gift  of  God  to  men — 
you  put  the  dicta  of  the  council  of  Trent, 
the  decision  of  desiccated  bishops,  as  I 
have  said,  who,  to  further  their  own  ends, 

made  for  unborn  generations  such  rules 
[95] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

that  to  obey  them  you  must  disobey 
God.  In  substance  of  your  action  you 
say,  "  O  God !  you  have  given  me 
something  wholly  unessential  to  my 
churchliness,  and  in  fact  a  snare  to  my 
heavenly  progress.  I  shall  use  only  a 
part  of  the  nature  you  gave  me.  The 
council  of  Trent  knew  better  than  you, 
O  Lord !  That  I  shall  follow  and  its 
laws  obey  in  preference  to  yours." 

In  your  life  you  tacitly  accuse  your 
God  of  an  act  that  you  would  deem  con- 
temptible in  a  finite  being — not  only  con- 
temptible but  felonious,  for  you  make 
him  an  aider  and  abettor  in  entrapping 
you  into  crimes,  from  suffering  for  which 
you  could  not  in  your  theology  extricate 
yourself  through  all  eternity.  It  is  as  I 
have  repeatedly  told  you,  the  church 
detracts  from  the  influence  of  her  relig- 
ious teachings  by  petty  rules,  canonical 
commands,  and  ceremonial  exactness,  the 
observance  of  which  out-balances  in  the 
minds  of  its  disciples  real  truth  and 
strength  and  simplicity. 

[96] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

I  don't  for  a  minute  think  we  are  the 
only  ones.  Doubtless  thousands  have 
suffered  as  you  and  I  are  suffering,  and 
for  the  same  cause.  But  is  that  any  reason 
why  we  should  welter  in  pain  apart  ?  Let 
us  break  with  the  power  at  once.  Pain 
enough  there  is  in  the  world  without  add- 
ing to  it  by  ignoble  prostration  of  our 
sanity  before  a  fantastic  priesthood;  in 
Browning's  words — 

"All  Peter's  chains  about  his  waist,  his  back 
Brave  with  the  needlework  of  Noodledom." 

In  the  face  of  such  facts  how  help- 
less you  are!  I  feel  like  carrying  you 
as  the  peasant  women  about  Weimar 
swing  their  children  between  arm  and 
breast. 

But  my  conception  of  God  and  my 
conception  of  mankind  will  not  let  me 
believe  Jesus  is,  or  was,  God.  You  say 
you  cannot  help  believing  it.  But  even 
supposing  he  were,  is  that  any  reason  why 
we  should  not  be  married?  Your  rea- 
soning is — God  was  manifest  in  the  flesh 

7  [97] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

nineteen  hundred  years  ago,  ergo  I  can- 
not marry  you,  although  I  believe  our 
best  lives  would  be  lived  in  our  union, 
and  my  own  nature  find  its  best  expres- 
sion. You  dear  thing!  Jesus  would  not 
need  to  be  God  to  have  his  heart  yearn 
over  you.  Any  simple  man  would  bleed 
with  pity  at  your  pain  and  blindness. 
The  spirit  of  Jesus  would  tell  you  you 
best  do  his  bidding  when  you  live  in 
accord  with  the  gentle,  loving  nature  with 
which  God  endowed  you. 

You  will  leave  your  wheel  of  the  eccle- 
siastical machine.  You  have  promised 
so  long.  And  you  have  loved  me  and 
never  turned  from  your  love.  Nature 
made  you  beautiful.  But  that  warp  in 
your  character  which  your  doctrine  and 
your  education  have  implanted — it  has 
made  you  at  odds  with  the  great  moral 
laws  of  the  world,  untrue  to  the  best  in- 
stincts God  has  given  you. 

You  say  that  in  your  life  nothing  has 

been  better  than  your  love  for  me.     God 
[98] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

put  it  in  your  heart  and  you  see  that  even 
the  powers  of  your  ecclesiasticism  cannot 
take  it  out.  You  will  be  true  to  the  best 
that  is  in  you.  You  will  not  be  a  moral 
coward.  If  the  scales  would  only  fall 
from  your  eyes  and  you  no  longer  be  pur- 
blind to  the  real  light!  In  thinking  on 
your  state  my  heart  softens,  and  I  pity 
you  and  blame  the  servitude.  You  never 
think  of  bending  the  world  to  yourself. 
You  have  the  true  Romish  acquiescence. 
You  are  a  son  of  your  church,  and  love 
with  you  cannot  be  supreme.  Ever  the 
church  and  its  blighting  power  first, 
is-  your  teaching  and  law.  And  your 
church's  law  is  hard — why,  the  hardness 
of  other  law  is  as  liquid  quicksilver  to  the 
steel  of  ecclesiastical  law.  It  asserts  its 
law,  and  proclaims  "all  rights  reserved" 
over  its  peoples  and  their  souls  and 
bodies  in  this  and  all  other  worlds.  Its 
priests  even  assert  that  they  have  the 
patent  right  to  make  God  in  the  material 
form  of  the  wafer,  just  as  they  proclaim 

their  aristocratic  rights  in  spiritual  do- 
too] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

minion.     Like  the  bishop  who  ordered 
his  tomb  at  St.  Praxed's,  they  would 

"Hear  the  blessed  mutter  of  the  mass, 
And  see  God  made  and  eaten  all  day  long, 
And  feel  the  steady  candle-flame,  and  taste 
Good,  strong,  thick,  stupefying  incense-smoke!" 

So  I  have  written.  Now  it  is  midnight, 
and  I  am  looking  at  the  patient  stars  and 
saying,  "Where  is  my  life,  and  what  is 
he  doing  ?  Is  he  also  thinking  and  long- 
ing?" Ah,  there  is  the  steady  flame  of 
your  lamp  far,  far  down  the  hillside  and 
lighting  the  treetops.  It  is  the  old,  at- 
tractive, engaging  signal  of  Hero.  But 
what  was  the  foaming  Hellespont  to  the 
doubt  and  Cimmerian  gloom  that  lie  be- 
tween you  and  me,  and  the  saltness  of 
our  tears  ? 


[100] 


XII. 

It  is  by  our  ideas  that  we  ennoble  our  passions  or  we 
debase  them;  they  rise  high  or  sink  low  according  to 
the  man's  soul. 

VAUVENARGUES. 

DEAR  heart,  I  have  clasped  you  in  my 
arms  a  thousand  times  since  I  parted 
from  you  last  night,  begging  you  to  keep 
faith  with  me.  Your  depression  con- 
sumes me.  My  heart  has  ached  for  you 
ever  since — ached  anew,  I  should  say, 
for  the  pain  is  there  all  the  time.  We 
must  have  the  courage  of  our  faith — that 
we  love  each  other  and  God  gave  us  the 
love.  And  it  seems  to  me  the  only  way 
we  can  keep  and  show  the  courage  is  to 
hope  and  work  steadily  for  the  final  joy 
— our  union. 

"It  is  so  long  a  time,  dear,  already" — 
[101] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

your  words  have  rung  in  my  ears  and  I 
know  how  faint-hearted  I  grow  when  I 
stop  to  count  the  awful  weeks  and  months 
and,  alas!  years,  and  all  the  deadly  pain 
they  have  held  for  both  of  us.  Do  not 
think  I  forget  what  has  passed  and  what 
it  has  cost  us.  Not  only  during  those 
years,  but  for  the  future,  it  reduced  our 
strength — nay,  it  has  even  shortened  our 
lives.  But  for  myself  I  count  not  loss, 
if  at  last  I  may  rest  in  your  unceasing 
love  and  constant  presence  through  the 
years  that  remain.  I  do  not  ask  you 
to  do  violence  to  your  religious  bias. 
If  I  were  to,  I  should  thereafter  be  the 
thrall  of  fears  and  misgivings  that  all  was 
not  well  with  you  even  if  you  seemed 
happy  and  contented.  I  can  only  wait 
for  God  to  send  some  light  or  relief  in 
some  way. 

It  is  a  hideous  light  in  which  you 
present  your  religion.  No  wonder  men 
of  independent  spirit  have  come  to 
hate  its  enslaving  rule.  The  beauty 

and  loveliness  of  abnegation  that  were 
[102] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

at  the  foundation  of  its  force  are  lost 
in  dogmatic  arrogance. 

Power  always  corrupts  when  men  pos- 
sess it  in  unlimited  measure.  It  has  done 
this  in  your  church.  Power  is  the  source 
of  its  absolute,  autocratic  spirit.  The 
church  existed  in  a  simple,  persuasive 
way  until,  in  the  turmoil  of  the  breaking 
up  of  kingdoms,  and  in  the  darkness  of 
an  unlettered  period,  its  alertness  and 
ambition  put  out  each  a  hand  and  gained 
domination.  Upon  that  domination  its 
present  rules  were  founded.  Its  power 
in  the  control  of  a  few  astute  politicians, 
they  proclaimed  their  possession  of  heaven 
and  earth — this  life  and  the  next — and 
placed  their  foot  on  the  neck  of  all  the 
mankind  they  knew,  or  could  reach.  It 
became  a  machine  which  could  say, "  This 
thou  shalt  do,  and  that  thou  shalt  not," 
even  when  thou  shalt  not  sundered  the 
sweetest  and  ennoblingest  love  of  all  the 
world. 

Can  you  let  yourself  remain  the  crea- 
ture of  so  worldly  a  manipulation?  I 
[103] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

do  not  say  you  have  not  Christianity. 
But  Christ's  teachings  are  so  covered 
up  and  concealed  by  a  bark  of  de- 
meaning dogmas,  laws  and  genuflex- 
ions that  the  original  pith  is  lost  and 
forgotten.  In  any  question,  what  is  it 
that  determines  your  action  ?  Is  it  the 
simple  teachings  of  Jesus?  Is  it  not 
rather  what  the  councils  and  Roman 
courts  have  declared  ?  You  set  the  church 
in  the  place  of  Christ  and  the  teach- 
ings of  your  theologians  in  the  stead 
of  the  simple  dicta  of  the  unworldly 
Galilean. 

Do  not  forget,  oh  beloved,  that  here 
on  this  Tuesday  morning,  at  a  quarter 
before  ten,  my  arms — my  arms? — yea, 
my  whole  body  is  aching  to  be  clasped 
in  your  embrace,  to  hear  your  voice 
name  me,  to  feel  the  balm  upon  my 
soul  that  your  presence  never  fails  to 
bring.  And  it  may  be  a  week  before  I 
see  you  for  a  brief  half  hour.  Oh, 

God,  if  I  were  stronger!     Then  might 
[104] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

there  be  some  chance  of  having  you  the 
sooner. 

If  opportunity  should  offer  for  me  to 
speak  to  a  friend,  and  tell  him  of  this 
great  and  beautiful  enigma  in  our  lives, 
and  how  a  solution  might  be  arrived  at, 
am  I  at  liberty  to  do  so  ?  That  is,  have  I 
permission  to  say  what  you  said  the  other 
day  about  opportunity  for  bread-win- 
ning and  the  like  ?  Do  not  fear  evil  from 
it.  Trust  to  my  discretion.  But  I  do  not 
like  to  speak  of  you — you  are  too  sacred 
a  subject — and  especially  I  do  not  like 
to  speak  of  our  most  dear  wishes,  unless 
your  consent  unites  with  me  in  the 
speaking. 

There  are  various  paths: 

You  to  remain  in  the  church— 

1.  Ask  that  you  be  freed  from  vows. 

2.  Marriage  without  permission. 

3.  Ask  the  archbishop  to  ask  permission. 

4.  Drift  and  wait. 

5.  Separate  forever. 

[105] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 
You  to  leave  the  church — 

Ministries 

f  In  which  you  could  have  substan- 

1.  Episcopal  4     tiallya  similar  faith  to  your  pres- 

l   ent. 

f  1.  Worker  in  public  philanthropies. 

2.  Radical    J  2.  Preacher. 

Unitarian  1  3.  Lawyer,  or  some    other   secu- 
L      lar  employment 

You  will  not  turn  aside  from  this 
appeal  my  friend  has  drawn  up.  Let  us 
go  to  the  archbishop  or  cardinal.  The 
cry  rises  within  me — "It  is  not  impos- 
sible." Certum  est,  quia  impossibile  est, 
says  Tertullian.  I  believe  it  can  be  done 
because  you  say  it  is  impossible.  If  you 
were  not  so  full  of  fear,  so  timid  of  ten- 
tative effort! 

It  is  my  last  desperate  cry  for  life. 
Insomnia  eats  my  mind  and  body  and  I 
go  about  a  shadow.  Every  impulse  the 
powers  about  you  heartlessly  push  back 
upon  me,  and  days  are  when  I  feel  I  am 

dying.    It  is  now  nearly  three  years  since 
[106] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

we  met.    What  have  we  not  suffered  and 
I  not  learned  ? 

I  have  been  asked  to  address  you,  and  to  apply 
advisedly  to  you  because  you  seem  the  most  emi- 
nent and  outspoken  champion  of  the  liberals  of 
your  church  in  this  country.  My  appeal,  or  ref- 
erence, is  wholly  a  professional  one,  and  comes 
from  one  of  my  clients  who  is  a  woman  of  native 
ability  learning,  and  refined  life.  She  is  not  a 
Catholic.  Another  whose  wishes  she  also  repre- 
sents in  this  matter,  but  who  perforce  makes  no 
personal  appeal  at  this  moment,  is  a  priest  of  your 
faith.  He  is  esteemed  among  men  whose  names 
are  familiar  to  you  for  his  unaffected  piety  and 
modesty,  and  self-sacrificing  beauty  of  life  and 
character. 

Between  this  man  and  woman  a  feeling  of  great 
strength  and  unity  has  grown.  They  have  re- 
peatedly endeavoured  to  set  it  aside,  and  after 
months  of  pain  and  misery  resolved  not  to  see  or 
write  to  each  other.  Just  as  often  some  event  has 
intervened  and  broken  their  purpose.  At  last  she 
has  won  the  priest  to  consent  to  her  appeal  to  you. 
In  short,  she  asks  your  intervention  at  the  Vatican 
that  the  priest  be  relieved  of  his  vows.  Direct 
advice  touching  him  I  will  send  after  I  have  heard 
[107] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

your  answer.  Our  presentations  would  have  been 
made  directly  to  the  Vatican,  and  not  to  your  em- 
barrassment, if  certain  of  her  friends  of  influence 
in  Italy  had  not  lately  died. 

It  may  be  needless — I  trust  you  will  not  deem 
it  gratuitous — for  me  to  point  out  that  the  grant- 
ing of  my  client's  request — that  the  priest  be  re- 
lieved of  his  vows — would  exert  most  beneficent 
influences  from  a  Catholic  point  of  view — for  one 
who  had  been  a  priest  would  still  hold  the  faith 
living  in  a  coterie  where  there  is  no  Catholic  ex- 
pression, and  would  undoubtedly  further  the  in- 
stitution more  than  if  continuing  his  present 
parochial  duties. 

That  you  may  comprehend  the  spirit  with 
which  you  have  to  deal,  let  me  say  that  in  conver- 
sation with  my  client,  when  I  suggested,  "If  we 
should  not  be  able — 

Before  I  could  finish  she  interrupted  me,  "  You 
know  Richelieu's  epigram, '  There's  no  such  word 
as  fail.'" 

"But  if,"  I  persisted. 

"  There  is  no  if  in  the  case,"  she  answered.  "  If  ? 
If  they  answer  negatively  and  there  is  no  chance 
at  Rome,  then  I  shall  show  him  [the  priest]  the 
history  of  celibacy  in  the  church  and  the  many 
times  priests  have  been  relieved  of  vows  since 
[108] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

celibacy  became  the  rule.  I  shall  persuade  him 
to  withdrawal  from  the  church,  or  at  least  to  secret 
marriage.  Neither  he  nor  I  would  like  a  secret 
marriage;  we  hate  any  act  that  is  covert  and  not 
in  the  sight  of  all  men.  But — I  shall  marry  him. 
After  my  death,  or  his,  the  relation  would  of 
course  become  known.  It  would  not  redound  to 
the  rules  to  which  he  is  subject.  On  the  other 
hand  I  should  be  pained  to  have  him  lay  down 
his  religious  forms  while  he  has  any  apparent 
faith  in  them.  I  have  entire  knowledge  that  the 
mass  of  his  co-religionists  would  abuse  him  with  a 
ready  tongue.  And,  so  long  as  he  thinks  the  forms 
essential,  I  should  like  to  have  him  keep  to  them. 
But  I  repeat  to  you  what  I  said  to  him,  '  There's 
no  such  word  at  fail.'  Priests'  vows  have  in  the 
past  been  set  aside  by  various  popes  again  and 
again — for  money  or  for  policy.  On  the  12th  of 
May,  1801,  Pius  VII  wrote, '  As  for  the  absolution 
of  the  married  priests  .  .  .  *  we  shall  see  to  it  by 
giving  the  necessary  powers  in  order  that  they  may 
be  absolved  according  to  the  rules  and  to  eccle- 
siastical discipline.'  Money  I  cannot  just  now 
offer,  But  policy  on  the  part  of  the  church  should 
grant  the  request.  It  is  all  a  case  of  measuring  its 
own  advantages.  Its  secular  eye  is  far-seeing 
enough  to  discover  that  such  a  concession  would 
[109] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

be  advantageous.  In  the  last  century  Pius  IX 
emphasized  anew  the  idea  of  celibacy.  What  else 
could  he  with  the  flowers  of  the  amours  of  a  car- 
dinal in  his  presence — even  if  the  cardinal  were 
not  a  priest  ?  Whatever  we  take  in  hand  must  be 
in  entire  secrecy.  There  must  be  no  trumpeting." 

I  have  repeated  my  client's  words  in  order  that 
you  may  thoroughly  comprehend  her  spirit — as 
I  said  above.  In  the  event  of  affirmative  action 
a  simple  announcement  of  release  from  vows 
would  be  all  it  is  essential  to  say  to  the  world. 

Marriage  with  retention  of  priesthood  w^ould 
be  still  more  satisfactory  to  my  client.  But  this 
"privilege"  has  not  been  granted  so  often  or  so 
lately  as  that  I  have  indicated.  If  such  a  sug- 
gestion strikes  you  as  extraordinary  or  absurd, 
kindly  understand  it  is  not  to  one  who  views  the 
case  with  unecclesiastical  eyes,  and  who  sees  that 
such  concessions  must  come  if  your  church  con- 
tinues upon  American  soil. 

My  client's  character  is  so  well  known  to  me 
that  I  can  assure  you  no  interference,  discomfort, 
or  disaster  would  result  if  she  were  placed  in  so 
singular  a  position.  Indeed,  under  such  condi- 
tions she  would  be  self-poised,  and  a  strong  aider 
and  worker  in  charitable,  humane,  and  educational 
undertakings.  Her  sympathies  and  abilities  are 
[110] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

already  enlisted  on  the  side  of  the  ignorant  and 
oppressed.  I  know  she  has  weighed  the  possibili- 
ties of  carrying  on  parochial  classes  for  teaching 
women  elements  of  healthful  cooking,  sewing, 
cleanliness,  and  care  of  the  body.  And  I  know  of 
one  instance  where  she  set  forth  to  two  or  three 
priests  the  need  of  higher  education  among  Catho- 
lic women  and  the  advantages  that  would  accrue 
to  the  church  if  such  plans  as  she  outlined  were 
adopted  and  realised. 

I  have  entered  into  these  minutiae  in  endeavour 
to  present  my  client  and  save  her  from  miscon- 
ception; in  order  that  you  may  see  she  is  not  an 
ordinary  woman  to  be  judged  by  ordinary  stand- 
ards. To  mention  such  facts  as  I  have  may  make 
her,  I  fear,  seem  Quixotic — while  she  is  balanced, 
sensible,  and  practical.  But  she  is  an  American 
of  the  old  stock — Acatholica  according  to  your 
distinctions — and  has  been  brought  up  in  the 
freedom  and  liberality  that  inform  the  best  people 
of  our  country,  and  also  with  the  faith  that  there 
are  no  difficulties  which  justice,  truth,  and  good 
purpose  may  not  overcome.  She  has  already 
been  identified  with  works  of  our  neophilan- 
thropy. 

I  have  had  no  direct  communication  with  the 
priest  upon  this  question.  I  know,  however,  that 
[111] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

the  facts  are  exactly  as  I  state  them.  I  can  assure 
you  of  his  most  vital  interest  in  what  I  have  set 
forth  and  of  his  sincerity  in  endeavour  to  do  right 
in  the  struggle  between  the  past,  and  its  promises 
given  in  the  inexperience  and  ignorance  of  life,  and 
the  present  and  future  which  contain  his  heart- 
felt desires. 

If,  in  your  opinion  and  with  your  support,  I 
should  be  warranted  in  making  a  formal  applica- 
tion, I  will  journey  to  you  to  consult  with  you,  or 
I  will  advise  under  the  seal  of  secrecy  with  a  rep- 
resentative whom  you  may  name.  A  plea  for  re- 
lease from  priesthood  vows  might  be  based  upon 
the  ground  of  transference  to  another  and  broader 
field  of  labour,  for  that  is  what  this  marriage — the 
marriage  regularly  accredited  by  the  church — 
would  mean,  whether  the  priest  remains  in  his 
priesthood  or  not. 

I  realise  the  importance  of  the  question  which 
this  letter  may  suggest  to  you.  I  shall  be  obliged 
for  any  advice  that  will  help  to  such  solution  as 
my  client's  friends  would  wish.  I  await  your  an- 
swer with  solicitude,  and  I  remain,  dear  and  ven- 
erable sir, 

Very  truly  yours, 


[112] 


XIII, 

With  voices  of  men  made  lowly, 

Made  empty  of  song, 
O  Lord  God  most  holy, 

O  God  most  strong, 
We  reach  out  hands  to  reach  thee 

Ere  the  wine-press  be  trod ; 
We  beseech  thee,  O  Lord,  we  beseech  thee, 

O  Lord  our  God. 

A.    C.    SWINBUKNE. 

TO-NIGHT  the  moon  hangs  full  in  the 
heavens.  What  a  soft  suggestiveness  of 
slow  walking  with  you  under  leafy  trees ! 
On  such  nights  as  this,  if  we  were  mar- 
ried, I  should  pull  aside  the  curtain  to 
see  you  as  you  lay  asleep — to  feast  my 
eyes  on  your  calm  lids,  not  trusting  to 
any  sense  of  touch  or  sound  of  your  unin- 
terrupted breathing.  And  then  when  the 

long  waking  hours  were  come,  what  would 
8  [113] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

I  not  say  to  you  and  you  to  me  ? — laying 
plans  for  the  future,  telling  the  sadness 
and  joy  of  the  past,  giving  each  other 
strength  and  love  and  courage  for  what- 
ever hardship  life  might  unfold. 

To  be  with  you,  to  think  with  you,  feel 
with  you,  lose  myself  in  you !  I  would  lay 
aside  my  past  life,  forget  and  not  consider 
it,  if  I  could  once  know  that  you  were 
wholly  mine  and  I  wholly  yours — that  no 
force,  no  power,  no  authority  stood  be- 
tween us.  So  God  and  nature  designed, 
not  the  unnatural,  forced,  extravagant, 
fantastic  immolation  which  you  now 
serve,  and,  serving,  pine  and  suffer. 

You  are  like  a  man  who  at  the  tenderest 
age  has  been  put  in  an  iron  contrivance 
for  keeping  straight  a  body  perfect  from 
the  hand  of  nature.  Having  once  learned 
to  walk  with  the  machine,  he  cannot 
stand  or  walk  without  it.  It  is  clasped 
about  him  while  he  grows  even  to  man's 
stature.  He  leans  upon  it  and  accom- 
modates his  growth  to  it,  repressing  in- 
stinctive outputs  here  and  there,  until,  if 
[114] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

you  loose  it  or  take  out  one  iron  or  clamp, 
he  falls  helpless.  He  stands  not  because 
he  is  a  man  endowed  with  the  God-given 
strength  of  a  long  line  of  ancestors  sinewy 
with  the  d,ivine  energy  of  upward-strug- 
gling, but  because  the  machine,  moulded 
and  fitted  together  by  the  hands  of  arti- 
sans clever  at  their  work,  holds  him  with 
its  steel  network.  He  even  distrusts  his 
own  strength  and  begs  you  not  to  take 
away  his  prop.  He  fears  the  liberty  of 
moving  about  as  God  meant  all  creatures 
to  do.  His  native  weakness  he  is  con- 
stantly told  about  until  he  believes  God- 
given  strength  is  a  delusion  and  sin,  and 
at  last  he  cannot  walk  or  stand  in  pure 
sunshine  unless  the  horrible  mechanism 
and  hideous  gearings  are  clamped  about 
his  flesh.  He  is  as  men  who  have  been 
long  imprisoned  in  a  dungeon,  who  dread 
liberty  and  light  when  at  last  they  are 
granted,  and  shudder  and  fear  and  cling 
to  their  narrow  darkness  rather  than  to 
the  beauty  and  breadth  of  God's  fair 

world  in  sunlight  and  starlight. 
[115] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

No  "heretic"  tried  by  the  church  with- 
out defence  has  ever  escaped  condemna- 
tion. The  result  of  the  presentation  of 
our  case  was  foregone.  But  that  you  will 
never  kiss  me  again,  that  you  will  never 
again  bury  your  face  in  my  neck,  upon 
"the  whiteness  there"  as  you  say,  and 
cry  "I  want  you,  oh,  I  want  you!"  But 
you  shall,  again  and  again. 

Do  not  say  you  have  been  false  to  God. 
To  be  true  to  the  best  in  you  is  to  be  true 
to  God.  But  you  will  surely  be  false,  if 
you  do  as  you  say.  You  have  been  true 
to  your  sweet  human  nature,  and  true  to 
your  manly  heart,  and  so  true  to  God. 
You  have  been  true  to  the  loving  divinity 
of  human  nature  which  has  been  growing 
all  these  millions  of  years  in  which  men 
and  women  have  been  growing — which 
was  long  before  the  old  Inquisition  was 
born  of  the  distorted  fanaticism  which 
had  hatred  for  sire  and  superstition  for 
dam.  You  have  been  true  to  the  human 
love  which  will  exist  long  after  the  church 

is  dead  and  men  shall  be  pointing  a  fin- 
[116] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

ger  at  its  lasting  inquisitorial  dominion 
and  turn  away  shuddering  that  such  cor- 
ruption ever  enslaved  one  single  human 
soul. 

My  head  is  full  of  you.  I  cannot  keep 
it  quiet.  Perhaps  if  I  write  I  may  stop 
the  ache.  And  it  will  not  hurt  you.  Ever 
since  yesterday  it  has  throbbed.  What 
you  said  has  pulsed  within  just  as  the 
screw  of  a  steamer  turns  and  throbs  and 
will  not  let  the  vessel  stop.  Somehow  the 
matter  always  comes  for  us  to  speak  about 
when  I  am  weakest  and  most  bested.  Let 
us  not  speak  as  yesterday  until  I  have 
strength  to  stand — to  stand  as  long  as  it 
takes  you  to  speak  the  farewell.  And  I 
spoke  quickly.  That  has  troubled  me. 
But  I  was  angry — as  I  have  seen  a  pan- 
ther shut  in  a  cage  and  prodded  by  hard- 
hearted keepers.  Forget  what  I  said.  If 
I  could  see  you  just  a  moment  to  hear 
that  sweet  voice  say  you  forgive! 

Do  not  be  afraid.    Act  out  what  your 

heart  tells  you  is  right,   and  if  all  the 

[117] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

world  blames  you  my  arms  shall  shelter 
you  in  love  always.    Come,  come — 

"  So  let  us  melt  and  make  no  noise  , 

No  tear-floods  nor  sigh-tempests  move; 
'Twere  profanation  of  our  joys 
To  tell  the  laity  our  love." 

I  shall  send  this  letter: 

MY  DEAR  SIR: 

The  question  has  lately  been  asked  me,  "How 
— under  what  conditions — would  the  Unitarians 
receive  a  Roman  Catholic  priest  to  their  member- 
ship and  possibly  to  their  ministry  ?  "  In  fact,  I 
have  not  only  been  asked  the  question,  but  cir- 
cumstances have  put  it  to  me.  While  listening  to 
your  sermon  last  Sunday,  I  thought  that  you 
might  be  willing  to  help  me  to  an  answer — since 
from  the  point  of  view  of  liberal  Unitarianism  the 
progress  and  uplifting  of  a  human  soul  are 
involved. 

I  trust  I  am  not  trenching  too  much  upon  your 
patience  and  forbearance  in  making  the  request. 
It  is  a  matter  I  could  not  bring  to  any  Unitarian 
I  know,  and  one,  moreover,  about  which  I  could 
most  easily  speak  with  a  stranger. 

If  you  should  prefer,  before  giving  definite  an- 
[1181 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

swer,  to  know  more  than  I  can  write,  and  if  you 
should  also  choose  to  tell  me  by  word  of  mouth 
rather  than  by  writing,  I  will  see  you  at  your  con- 
sulting room  at  your  most  convenient  hour. 
Whichever  way  you  choose ;  or  if  you  do  not  care 
to  answer  the  question  at  all,  may  I  beg  the  ut- 
most prudence  and  circumspection  in  the  matter  ? 
Any  mention,  or  publication  of  such  a  change  as 
imminent,  might  irremediably  wound  the  sensitive 
nature  of  the  possible  convert,  turn  him  with  ex- 
tremes of  penance  to  the  old  forms,  and  lose  what- 
ever of  liberal  outlook  has  been  gained.  I  am, 

Very  truly  yours, 
KATHERINE  PESHCONET. 

DEAR  MADAM: 

There  is  a  hospitable  provision  for  receiving 
into  the  Unitarian  body  worthy  ministers  from 

other  churches.  Rev.  Dr. is  chairman  of  a 

"  Committee  of  Fellowship,"  and  any  such  appli- 
cant as  you  describe  would  be  sure  of  kindly  con- 
sideration. Of  course  he  should  be  able  to  show 
an  honourable  record,  and  satisfactory  testimo- 
nials from  the  church  he  leaves,  though  the  Roman 
Catholics  could  not  be  expected  to  send  him  away 
with  benediction. 

I  have  no  clear  occasion  to  say  more,  perhaps; 
[119] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

but  the  kindly  confidence  expressed  in  your  letter 
encourages  me  to  add  a  caution. 

There  seems  to  be  something  in  the  education, 
training,  and  habits  of  thought  and  life  of  a  Romish 
priest  which  is  peculiarly  disqualifying  for  the  min- 
istry of  our  Protestant  and  Free  Churches.  Accus- 
tomed to  take  everything  upon  authority  and  to 
work  under  direction  of  a  superior,  he  is  apt  to 
show  some  serious  weaknesses  when  thrown  upon 
his  own  resources ;  and  I  think  a  majority  of  such 
converts  break  down  morally  after  doing  some  mis- 
chief in  our  parishes.  Certainly,  if  a  priest  gets 
his  eyes  open  to  the  false  pretension  of  his  church 
he  must  withdraw  or  do  worse ;  but  he  must  not 
take  it  for  granted  that  his  priestly  training  will 
fit  him  for  a  spiritual  ministry  in  a  Protestant  com- 
munion ;  for,  as  a  rule,  it  has  unfitted  him.  Epis- 
copacy as  a  working  method  might  more  nearly 
suit  him;  but  for  our  work  he  should  lay  new  foun- 
dations by  some  years  of  study  and  related  work. 

Knowing  nothing  at  all  of  the  case  to  which 
your  letter  refers,  I  may  be  wasting  my  solicitude; 
but  I  have  written  in  the  light  of  some  sorrowful 
experiences.  If  you  can  make  any  good  use  of  me, 
for  consultation  or  otherwise,  I  shall  be  found 
Your  willing  fellow-servant, 

[120] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

MY  DEAR  SIR: 

Will  you  be  good  enough  to  inform  me,  with 
what,  if  any,  probation,  a  Roman  Catholic  priest, 
born  and  bred  a  Roman  Catholic,  of  unimpeach- 
able character,  success  in  his  ministrations  and 
unusual  popularity  in  his  own  and  other  parishes 
— a  gentle,  sensitive,  sympathetic,  reverential 
nature,  I  should  say,  and  withal  a  strong  one — 
would  be  received  into  the  ministry  of  the  Epis- 
copal Church,  either  the  ritualistic  or  broad 
church  branch,  as  he  might  elect  ? 

I  ask  this  for  the  sake  of  another.  May  I  beg 
the  utmost  prudence  in  its  consideration,  and  as 
early  an  answer  as  you  can  conveniently  give. 

I  am 
Yours  very  truly, 

KATHERINE  PESHCONET. 

And  no  answer  came. 


[121] 


XIV. 

Speak  your  latent  conviction,  and  it  shall  be  the  uni- 
versal sense;  for  the  inmost  in  due  time  becomes  the 
outmost. 

EMERSON. 

I  AWOKE  calmly  in  the  morning  and  was 
thankful  that  you  had  taken  it  in  your 
own  hands  and  said  it  could  not  be.  I 
see  the  diversity  in  our  lives — not  only  in 
the  present,  but  in  what  has  been.  We 
submit  to  necessity.  There  is  no  over- 
coming the  fate  consequent  upon  what 
has  been.  You  have  behind  you  all  the 
legends  of  the  Irish  immigrant.  To  me 
you  are  as  well-born  as  any  man.  But 
the  imperative  necessity  of  environment 
since  your  birth !  That  is  the  part  I  can- 
not overcome  with  all  strength  and  all 

patience  and  all  love. 
[122] 


And  yet  when  I  see  you  ready  to  drop 
out  of  my  life,  I  am  frozen  with  terror  and 
cry,  "Life  of  my  life,  stay  with  me,  come 
what  may.  Oh,  do  not  fear  to  follow 
your  heart.  They  cannot  use  irons  to 
burn  or  mangle  the  dear  flesh  in  these 
days.  Do  not  fear.  Laws  would  inter- 
vene— even  if  they  tried  imprisonment 
on  the  plea  of  insanity." 

It  is  not  the  physical  torture  you  fear 
but  the  loss  of  mental  support,  the  church 
your  crutch,  and  the  anger,  vituperation, 
and  uncharity  of  your  co-religionists. 
They  could  not  destroy  your  soul  and  I 
would  protect  your  body.  It  makes  a 
coward  of  you — you  who  by  birthright 
are  courageous.  You  should  not  be  a 
Catholic  priest.  You  should  be  a  free 
man. 

But  I  see  more  and  more  clearly  that 
we  could  not  have  a  happy  married  life, 
if  it  were  entered  upon  with  any  viola- 
tion of  your  spiritual  being.  And  the 
thought  hardens  and  maddens  me.  For 

it  means  that  I  cannot   have  you  at  all 
[123] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

And  I  want  you,  oh,  dearest  heart,  I  long 
for  you  constantly  and  yearn  over  you 
with  tenderest  devotion. 

Your  own  sufferings  should  teach  you 
the  iniquity  that  is  under  your  ecclesiasti- 
cal rule.  It  is  not  right  for  you  to  uphold  it 
without  murmur,  and  thus  entail,  or  help 
to  entail  upon  others,  the  possibility  and 
probability  of  like  suffering.  It  is  right 
for  you  to  speak  out  against  it,  and  save 
those  who  come  after  you  from  like  awful 
struggle  with  temptation  to  break  the 
church's  laws  and  live  the  large  life  of  a 
free  and  rational  man. 

"And  priests  in    black    gowns  were   walking  their 

rounds, 
And  binding  with  briers  my  joys  and  desires." 

The  fault — it  was  not  a  fault  but  a  vir- 
tue— lay  in  my  reaching  out  and  en- 
deavouring to  bring  you  by  the  strength 
of  love  into  a  new  and  larger  life,  to 
give  you  new  scenes,  new  feelings,  new 
thoughts,  new  vigour,  and  new  heart. 

Dear  love,  I  strove  to  do  right — what,  I 

still  think,   was   the   only   conscientious 
[124] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

course  I  could  have  followed.  Your  life 
is  so  narrow,  so  inferior  to  your  nature, 
that  it  strikes  me  with  pain  every  time  I 
turn  to  its  meretriciousness.  Person- 
alities are  just  as  frequent  in  the  narrowed 
sphere  of  your  priesthood  as  in  our 
greater  life,  and  from  what  you  have  told 
me  I  see  the  resentments,  jealousies,  vin- 
dictiveness,  retaliations,  fears  and  ambi- 
tions are  as  much  pettier  as  the  sphere  is 
smaller.  And  you  like  it,  this  narrow  life  ? 
— and  love  to  be  clothed  in  a  little  brief 
authority  ? — and  for  it  will  desert  me  ? 
You  are  used  to  homage  and  would  miss 
it.  But  from  whom  does  it  come  ?  Does 
their  ignorance  not  melt  your  heart  ? 

Most  pitiable  are  you  in  my  eyes. 
That  which  belittles  our  beautiful  hu- 
man nature — the  nature  entirely  beauti- 
ful in  you — is  always  pitiable.  But  that 
which  renders  abortive  the  sweetest  and 
deepest  and  truest  instincts  of  every  soul, 
that  I  cannot  help  negating  with  all  my 
strength.  If  you  had  not  so  crass  and 

material  ideas  of  God!     Catholicism  is 
[125] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

materialism.  It  cannot  even  have  a 
spiritual  God. 

As  I  lie  awake  in  the  night,  or  as  I  go 
about  in  the  open,  or  sit  reading  or  writ- 
ing, your  lonely  figure  comes  before  me. 
Its  sweet  sad  eyes  shine  out  in  space,  and 
the  mouth  quivers  in  sorrow  and  pain. 
No  more  do  you  seem  to  stand  before  my 
chair,  and  I  pull  you  to  me  and  listen  to 
the  heart-beats. 

Do  you  forget  those  high-hearted 
months  three  years  ago  when  our  love 
was  still  an  unexplained  newness,  how 
we  hoped  and  took  each  other  by  the 
hand,  and  said,  "It  shall  be"— do  you 
remember,  beloved?  How  strong  and 
courageous  we  tried  to  be!  How  I 
dreamed  of  our  future  life  as  I  walked 
through  streets,  and  was  conscious  only 
of  the  flood  of  love  in  which  I  floated, 
and  of  hope  and  the  high  courage  which 
takes  life  in  hand. 

Now  I  walk  over  the  same  ways 
with  an  unceasing,  dumb  ache  and  long- 
ing, for  the  lo'Te  that  has  been  pouring 
[126] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

from  my  being  towards  you,  you  have 
built  a  bar  against.  It  is  as  if  you  had 
dammed  a  clear  mountain  stream  along 
which  violets  and  white  anemones  and 
flowering  innocents  and  all  sweet  things 
grow,  and  the  waters  are  shut  back  on 
themselves  and  confusedly  mingle  and 
are  disturbed  and  drown  the  native 
beauty  that  surrounds  them — the  growth 
of  tree  and  grass  and  flower.  Every 
fountain  having  its  waters  near  from  a 
thousand  delicate  channels  becomes  un- 
clear also.  And  that  which  God  had 
meant  for  a  beauty  and  source  of  life  to 
every  seed  of  the  mountain  and  plain 
below  becomes  its  greatest  defacer,  some- 
thing deadly  and  malevolent.  So  it  is 
with  the  stream  of  my  love  to  you. 

I  lie  and  think  of  you  and  our  fallen 
hopes  through  the  long  night  hours,  and 
I  am  only  conscious  that  you  are.  And 
my  watch  ticks  beside  me  and  my  cheeks 
are  wet. 

"Oh!  dearest  love,  sweet  home  of  all  my  fears, 
And  hopes  and  joys  and  parting  miseries." 
[127] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

You  will  come  and  see  me.  I  will  not 
touch  you — not  even  your  hand.  We  can 
sit  and  talk  of  your  hopes  and  ambitions 
and  our  common  friendships — is  this  not 
so?  I  shall  never  again  ask  you  "to  give 
up  your  faith"  as  you  phrased  it  this 
morning,  but  simply  pity  your  slavery 
and  pray  God  I  may  live  to  see  the  end  of 
it.  I  shall  not  even  tease  you  to  tell  me 
where  that  toe  of  the  trinity  is  which 
your  church  verified  and  exhibited  to  its 
faithful  some  three  hundred  years  agone — 
and  whether  it  is  mortal  or  immortal, 
albeit  I  should  like  to  know.  But  come, 
let  me  see  you  and  help  you.  Let  us 
quicken  the  world  and  make  all  mon- 
strous pretence  and  lie  impossible.  No 
one  of  your  friends  or  relations  knows 
your  mind,  your  nature,  your  soul,  as  I. 

You  told  me  this  morning  I  did  not 
look  well.  Ye  gods!  Can  you  not  have 
mercy?  Does  the  butcher,  after  he  has 
summoned  his  strength,  wakened  his 
muscle,  and  dealt  his  mortal  blow,  say 

that  to  his  victim  ? 

[128] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

How  has  it  been?  When  with  you  I 
forgot  the  days  freighted  with  anxious 
cares,  the  tossing,  wearying  sleep,  heart- 
ache, the  pang  of  fear  that  at  the  crucial 
moment  the  apparition  of  churchly  power 
might  cloud  your  judgment.  I  knew 
only  the  sense  of  rest  and  peacefulness 
the  pressure  of  your  hand  imparted.  I 
looked  at  the  calm  peace  of  your  face 
and  knew  the  world  had  for  me  nothing 
else  of  value.  I  struggled  with  expression 
of  love.  When  I  touched  you  I  touched 
infinity.  You  were  the  visible  presence 
of  God. 

Do  not  say  I  asked  you  to  give  up  your 
religion.  Not  your  religion;  but  the 
polity  of  life  which  your  church  attaches 
to  its  religion  and  makes  so  important 
that  the  spirit  of  the  religion  is  lost  in  it. 
But  never  again  shall  I  ask  it.  Do  not 
fear.  Its  hideousness  has  revolted  me. 
I  am  not  a  Protestant.  I  4o  not  protest. 
I  merely  say  your  church  is  a  tremendous 
lie  and  pretence.  At  what  should  I  pro- 
test ?  I  protest  against  all  lies. 

9  [129] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

It  is  a  net,  moreover,  which  has  you  in 
its  meshes.  The  net  is  woven  with  the 
warp  of  a  system  of  polity — your  slav- 
ery, espionage  over  you,  superstition,  de- 
ceit— and  a  woof  of  the  mild  and  simple 
religion  taught  nineteen  hundred  years 
ago  in  Galilee.  It  has  been  snaring  so 
long  —  the  net  —  that  it  is  wrell-nigh 
threadbare  in  places;  in  fact,  the  warp 
only  is  seen.  "We  are  in  an  age  of  tran- 
sition," said  one  of  your  archbishops  the 
other  day  to  some  of  his  school  teachers, 
"and  we  must  alter  our  ways  of  doing 
things."  Precisely.  Science  and  the 
industry  of  that  part  of  the  world  that  is 
not  Catholic  has  got  so  far  beyond  the 
Catholic  that  "you  must  alter  your  ways 
of  doing  things"  in  order  to  save  your- 
selves at  all. 

This  in  some  way  brings  to  mind  the 
time  you  laughingly  told  me  I  was  a 
heathen  not  to  cross  myself  before  I  sat 
down  to  dine — not  to  ask  God  to  bless  the 
food  of  which  I  was  about  to  partake. 

Now  I  think  it  impious  thus  familiarly 
[130] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

to  endeavour  to  bring  God  to  myself.  If 
I  partake  according  to  a  healthful  appe- 
tite, and  with  careful  mastication,  of 
wholesome,  digestible  food,  I  do  not  need 
to  mutter  a  prayer  and  beseech  God  to 
be  with  me.  God  is  with  me,  for  I  am 
keeping,  not  breaking,  God's  laws.  But 
if  I  break  the  laws  and  eat  gluttonously, 
or  too  hastily,  or  of  improper  food,  or  in 
any  other  way  unlawfully,  still  I  think  it 
impious  to  invoke  God.  For  I  should  be 
begging  God  to  be  a  partner  in  my  wrong- 
doing and  to  act  at  variance  with  laws 
of  nature — which  God  never  does.  I  do 
not  believe  in  "grace"  at  the  beginning 
of  meat,  but  a  true  sense  of  grace  all 
through  meat  and  in  every  act  of  con- 
sciousness. 

Now  I  understand  how  women  love 
men  and  men  love  women  after  the  one 
has  committed  some  crime.  I  love  you 
still  unspeakably  although  I  see  you  do 
what  is  unjust  and  dishonourable  and 
unmanly.  It  is  worth  while  giving  up 
[131] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

this  world — and  the  next,  too,  if  so  you 
count  it — for  such  love  as  I  have  for  you. 
You  cannot  know  how  it  would  enwrap 
you,  and  transfigure  and  glorify  you. 
The  trouble  of  it  all  would  be  that  I 
should  be  so  prostrate  before  the  shrine 
of  our  united  lives  that  I  should  become 
forgetful  of  the  step,  voice,  and  eye  of 
the  world,  its  cares,  needs,  and  perplexi- 
ties, and  fable  to  myself  heaven.  You 
have  no  conception  of  my  love.  It  moves 
within  me  as  an  immense  force  under 
whose  power  I  am  helpless.  It  exults 
through  my  body  and  tingles  the  extreme 
arteries.  What  is  it?  I  only  know  it  is 
the  force  driving  me  relentlessly  to  your 
arms.  If  they  are  closed  God  knows 
whither  I  shall  turn.  It  would  be  kinder 
to  take  me  blindfold  to  the  remotest 
steppe  of  Siberia,  and  tell  me  I  should 
never  have  food  or  warmth  till  I  found 
my  way  to  the  cities  of  men. 

Oh,  to  feel  the  passage  of  your  arm 
about  me,  its  cool,  strong  touch  and  the 
sweet  sense  of  yielding  to  you.    To  give 
[132] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

myself  wholly  to  you !  You  speak  of  your 
place  of  worship — do  you  know  where 
my  divine  services  would  be?  In  our 
house  every  hour  of  the  day.  And  my 
sanctuary?  Our  room  within  the  house 
— the  abode  of  our  selflessness. 

The  godliest  giving  and  the  godliest 
life,  I  say  it  again.  I  can  think  of  noth- 
ing purer,  sweeter,  fairer  than  to  love  you 
all  my  life,  to  lose  all  sense  of  self  in  the 
fire  of  our  love,  to  be  merged,  my  soul  in 
your  soul,  my  body  in  your  body — ay, 
the  old  ecclesiastical  "one  flesh"— and 
to  know  nothing,  to  be  conscious  of  noth- 
ing but  you.  Desire  for  such  annihila- 
tion swells  within  me.  Flame  runs 
through  my  veins.  The  outer  world  is 
dead.  I  am  conscious  only  of  you  and 
the  loving  God  that  made  you.  What 
has  value?  Naught  but  your  love  and 
tenderness.  Can  the  world  offer  anything 
holier  or  more  beautiful  ? 

Behind  this  great  and  worshipful  belief 
must  be  the  Primal  Life  of  the  universe— 
that  life  which  is  back  of  the  beginning 
[133] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

of  our  earth,  and  back  of  the  whole  mys- 
terious development  and  progress  of  our 
hunan  race.  It  drives  us  on.  It  impels 
us  to  self-sacrifice.  It  puts  in  our  hearts 
prayerful  desire  that  good  only  shall  sur- 
vive, and  that  because  of  our  love  poster- 
ity may  do  more  nobly,  live  more  nobly. 
I  long  for  my  own,  and  wonder  if 
motherhood,  which  deepens  and  sancti- 
fies the  flimsiest  life,  will  ever  ennoble 
mine. 


[134] 


XV. 

I  love  thee  with  the  breath, 

Smiles,  tears,  of  all  my  life! — and,  if  God  choose, 

I  shall  but  love  thee  better  after  death. 

ELIZABETH  BARRETT  BROWNING. 

DEAR  heart,  this  agony  is  killing  me,  and 
it  does  not  help  to  the  end  for  which  they 
are  inflicting  it.  I  love  you  just  as  ever. 
I  wonder  that  I  do.  But  that  I  do  is 
true.  Oh,  my  precious  one,  I  cannot 
give  you  up.  You  are  my  life,  health, 
strength,  my  only  joy.  My  eyes  burn 
like  balls  of  fire.  The  pain  in  my  body 
it  so  great  through  the  long  hours  of 
sleeplessness.  But  still  I  love  you,  and 
long  and  perish  for  you.  Do  you  wish 
that  I  should  die?  You  are  killing  me. 
Such  aching  misery  is  forerunner  of  the 
end. 

Anything  which  does  violence  to  gener- 
[135] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

ous  natural  impulses  is  wrong  and  must 
ultimately  become  the  ruin  it  deserves. 
Oh,  if  you  could  believe  otherwise! — 
that  God  and  nature  are  not  inimical, 
but  that  nature  and  right-doing  are  the 
most  beautiful  expression  of  God.  Our 
love  then  becomes  the  divine  thing  God 
meant  it,  and  not  a  secret,  covert  thing. 
Our  nature  is  but  an  expression  of  the 
all-pervading  being,  and  not  an  evil  to  be 
cast  aside.  Throw  the  absurd  fable  of 
"the  fall"  and  Adam  in  the  ash-pit  of  all 
dead  superstitions  and  turn  your  face  to 
the  light.  Turn,  turn,  don't  you  see  it  is 
God  and  Love  beckoning  you?  There 
is  noble  work  here  on  this  side,  much 
greater  than  what  you  are  doing.  That 
which  you  have  holds  your  people  back 
with  factitious  comforts.  That  which 
you  might  do  under  a  new  covenant 
would  be  nobler  and  loftier  in  itself, 
would  be  subject  to  but  one  law — the  law 
of  God — and  aim  at  but  one  expression 
— God's  simplest  daily  utterances  among 
men. 

[136] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

Do  not  desert  nie.  Come  back  to  love 
and  life  with  me.  Oh,  it  is  so  hideous, 
your  endeavour  to  turn  from  me.  It 
makes  me  into  iron;  and  then  to  fire.  I 
want  to  fly  to  you,  and  clasp  you  about 
the  neck,  and  cover  you  with  kisses,  and 
sob  away  the  pain  on  your  shoulder. 
Do  not  say  as  you  have  tried  to  say.  Let 
there  be  hope  for  the  future.  Let  me 
think  that  if  I  cannot  have  you  now,  the 
time  may  come — perhaps  within  a  year. 
We  shall  both  be  happy  then.  You  will 
be  happy.  It  is  a  sickly  fancy  that  you 
will  not.  Oh,  the  joy  and  blessedness  of 
being  with  you,  a  part  of  you,  thinking 
what  you  think,  feeling  what  you  feel, 
rising  and  lying  down  and  walking  the 
roadside  with  you.  Dear  God,  will  that 
time  ever  come  ?  To  be  able  to  pass  my 
hand  at  will  over  your  cheek,  to  follow 
the  firm  bend  of  the  chin,  to  stroke  the 
waving  hair  that  clings  with  such  char- 
acteristic tenacity  to  that  precious  head! 
But — above  all,  to  know  that  your  soul 

and  my  soul  were  blended  in  one  eternal 
[137] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

union  and  that  no  power  could  separate 
us!  The  thought  intoxicates  me.  And 
it  must  be.  Let  us  will  that  it  shall  be. 
Then  it  will  come. 

Just  now  I  am  exhausted,  for  I  grew 
over-weary  yesterday.  But  my  love  and 
devotion  to  you  never  swerve,  however 
ill  I  am.  When  I  am  sickest  and  weak- 
est I  feel  most  keenly  of  all  that  our  sepa- 
ration and  isolation  are  intolerable.  Your 
sweet  comfortings  would  be  ineffably 
tender  then.  But  are  you  never  going  to 
write  except  when  I  beg  for  a  letter?  I 
am  starving.  I  should  like  to  devour 
you.  And  when,  when  are  you  coming? 
I  looked  for  a  word  from  you  to-day,  and 
even  for  yourself  in  the  close  of  the  day. 
Oh,  if  I  could  see  you  to  touch  you,  kiss 
you  and  tell  you  there  is  nothing'  so  God- 
like in  your  life  as  our  love. 

Can  you  guess  what  I  send  you  through 
this  misty  air  and  under  these  leaden 
clouds?  Far  they  go  leaping  over  hills 

and  marshlands.    Much  of  the  nature  of 
[138] 


A  WOMAN'S    HEART 

the  rays  of  a  star,  of  the  sweetness  of  the 
honey-bee  harvest,  of  the  wind  of  dawn,  of 
the  purity  of  the  souls  of  our  unborn  chil- 
dren. They  are  white  like  lilies  and  as 
tender  as  dreams  of  our  life  together.  I 
see  them  rest  upon  your  lips  and  the  lines 
about  the  mouth  soften,  and  the  sad  look 
takes  flight,  and  the  love-light  grows  in 
your  eyes,  and  I  look  upon  you  with  the 
cry  "Dearest  and  sweetest  of  all  human 
kind." 

It  is  such  an  awful  giving  up.  Does  it 
not  seem  great  in  your  eyes?  It  pros- 
trates me  utterly.  I  cry  out,  "Is  it  nec- 
essary? May  he  not  wait?  Perhaps 
after  a  while  he  will  think  differently  and 
see  the  dishonour  of  what  he  now  thinks 
is  right.  Perhaps  if  he  waits  life  will  take 
on  broader  aspects,  and  he  will  believe 
that  to  injure  a  human  being  who  loves 
us  is  worse  than  breaking  with  super- 
stition." 

What  have  I  done  to  cause  it,  or  de- 
serve it?  I  have  been  too  fond  of  you, 

too  clinging,  too  ready  to  tell  in  word 
[139] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  action  how  infinitely  precious  you 
are  to  me  ? — or  endeavour  to  tell,  for  no 
words  can  tell.  Perhaps  I  have  wearied 
you  and  disgusted  you  with  iteration  and 
outcrying  and  adoration.  You  sit  near 
me  and  tell  of  your  interests,  of  what  your 
people  and  friends  say,  and  I  listen  and 
watch  your  figure  and  motion  and  the 
soul-light  play  upon  your  face,  thinking 
how  beautiful  it  is  to  have  you  near  me, 
and  how  well  I  know  every  passing  ex- 
pression of  your  countenance  and  every 
sweet  intonation.  That  is  worship  and 
adoration  beyond  what  your  penetralia 
ever  house. 

But  all  the  time  an  emptiness  is  gnaw- 
ing my  heart  and  I  am  saying  to  myself, 
"Poor  fool,  poor  fool,  why  will  you  look 
and  hope  further?  You  are  a  miserable 
devotee  of  one  who  will  never  heed  your 
oblation,  and  in  whose  building  for  the 
future  you  may  look  in  vain  for  the  scan- 
tiest recognition." 

It  is  said  men  weary  of  excessive  love 

in  women.    "  If  women  could  be  fair  and 
[140] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

yet  not  fond."  Perhaps  I  have  tired  you. 
There  can  be  no  end  to  my  love.  It  is  a 
fire  I  cannot  put  out. 

God  bless  you  for  the  sweet  letter  you 
wrote  Wednesday.  The  first  word  not 
hard  and  bitter  for  so  long.  I  felt  when  I 
read  it — what  I  used  to  feel — that  you 
truly  love  me.  And  I  have  read  it  many 
times  since  Friday  morning  brought  it. 
You  cannot  fancy  how  I  miss  the  little 
kisses  *  *  *  those  at  the  end  of  your  let- 
ters, and  the  "As  ever."  Those  little 
things  were  so  dear,  and  helped  to  fill  the 
longings  of  my  heart.  And  they  were  so 
innocent,  my  life — don't  you  see? — they 
were  so  innocent!  That  must  indeed  be 
a  black-souled  and  wicked  thing  which 
says  they  are  wrong.  They  are  like  a 
handclasp  in  friendship;  they  satisfy 
and  calm  the  mind.  Love  cannot  live 
without  them  even  in  your  warm  heart. 

Shall  I  tell  you  of  what  I  have  thought 
this  week?  I  think  I  should  have  gone 

mad  if  I  could  not  have  spoken — to  paper 
[141] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

at  least:  The  saddest  of  your  letter  is 
this  sentence,  "It  is  useless  for  me  to  hope 
or  desire."  Dear  heart,  how  can  you 
submit  to  have  your  manhood,  your  lib- 
erty, your  humanity  taken  from  you? 
What  are  you  if  you  cannot  hope  or  de- 
sire ?  To  hope  and  to  desire  are  the  great- 
est motor  forces  of  our  race,  that  by 
which  mankind  has  risen,  has  evolved, 
has  moved  along  the  line  of  advancement. 
Your  sentence  has  been  before  my  eyes 
ever  since  I  read  it.  It  rings  constantly 
in  my  ears.  I  can  think  of  nothing  more 
pathetic  or  heart-rending.  It  would  be 
awful  to  hear  it  from  a  malefactor,  or  from 
a  poor  eunuch,  or  from  a  shaven  monk  of 
the  twelfth  century.  But  to  hear  it  from 
you,  a  firm,  strong  man  born  and  reared 
in  the  latter  part  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, in  a  country  where  personal  liberty 
and  the  right  and  duty  of  private  judg- 
ment have  been  constant  watchwords, 
and  where  hundreds  of  thousands  of  men 
have  laid  down  their  lives  that  such  ideas 

might  be  preserved — it  tears  me  asunder. 
[142] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

You  are  so  unconscious  of  the  spirit  of 
the  air  which  you  breathe,  and  of  the 
great  Puritan  thought  which  informs  the 
laws  under  which  you  live. 

We  should  all  be  steeped  in  barbarism, 
living  in  caves,  gnawing  raw  flesh  from 
bones,  asserting  our  authority  by  the 
swing  of  a  club  (just  as  your  spiritual 
authority  swings  its  club  of  anathema 
over  your  head),  if  it  were  not  for  the 
inherent  right  of  human  beings  to  hope 
and  to  desire  and  to  act  out  mental  state 
in  the  physical  world.  This  is  the  secret 
of  growth,  of  cleanness,  of  morality.  Your 
restless  longing  and  striving,  under  your 
enforced  mental  inaction,  mean  that  your 
soul  is  reaching  out  for  higher  and  better 
experiences.  It  is  wrong  to  curb  the  mo- 
tion. 

Why  should  I  not  say  your  church  is  a 
mass  of  superstition  and  barbarous  tra- 
dition? Then  I  will  change  the  figure. 
It  is  rather  a  palsied  body,  tottering  with 
senility,  moribund  with  vitiated  blood. 

None  but  the  children  of  its  household 
[143] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

honour  it,  and  but  few  of  them.  They 
see  its  corruption  and  its  dislocated  skele- 
ton. Under  its  spangled  vestments  they 
know  it  is  hard,  hideous,  and  cruel,  and 
children  fear  to  look  in  its  face  because 
of  the  deeds  of  its  prime.  I  hate  it.  I 
hate  it.  I  hate  it.  It  deprives  me  of  hope. 
I  hate  it,  I  say.  It  enslaves  all  human 
beings  upon  whom  it  clasps  its  tentacles. 
It  takes  from  me  the  one  I  love  and  con- 
demns me  to  a  loveless,  lonely  life — when 
I  would  know  a  husband's  caresses  and 
the  pressure  of  a  son  at  nurse.  I  hate  it. 
My  health  of  body  and  mind  lay  in  you— 
every  happiness  my  soul  longed  for.  I 
hate  its  outrageous  authority.  I  hate  it 
with  fierce  will  and  I  pray  God  punish  it 
by  destruction  before  another  woman 
suffers  as  I  through  its  unpitying  mech- 
anism. God,  God  of  liberty  in  human 
life,  take  venegance  for  the  wrong  it  does 
me  and  every  woman  in  my  person! 

Don't  tell  me  "it  is  wiser  in  the  end." 

Wiser  in  the  end  to  live  in  loneliness  and 
[144] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

pain? — to  go  in  and  out  countless  days 
loveless  and  forlorn  ? — no  one  caring  and 
in  such  utter  heart-breaking  pain  that 
one  can  answer  no  human  pity  ? — to  have 
one's  nature  warped  by  misery  and  hard- 
ened by  despair  and  love  held  a  cheap 
thing  and  thrust  back  upon  itself?  Do 
not  say  you  have  been  false  to  God.  You 
are  false  to  God  when  you  do  as  your 
church  tells  you.  You  have  been  true  to 
your  sweet  human  nature,  true  to  your 
manly  instincts,  and  hence  true  to  the 
great  original  Love  back  of  your  nature 
and  back  of  us  all.  I  want  to  write  more, 
and  yet  more.  But  I  must  rest.  And 
you  ?  Rest,  and  do  not  suffer.  Rest,  and 
do  not  think  of  me.  Yes,  think  of  me 
often — all  the  time.  There  is  much  I 
would  say.  I  love  you  devotedly. 


10  [145] 


XVI. 

"  Good  action  has  created  the  life  of  the  world,  and 
in  so  doing  has  personified  itself  as  humanity;  so  we 
call  it  'the  mother  of  life  and  of  man.'  And  we 
have  defined  good  action  to  be  that  which  makes  an 
organism  more  organic.  .  .  . 

"The  character  of  an  organic  action,  then,  is  free- 
dom— that  is  to  say,  action  from  within.  The  action 
which  has  its  intermediate  antecedents  within  the 
organism  has  a  tendency,  in  so  far  as  it  alters  the 
organism,  to  make  it  more  organic,  to  raise  it  in  the 
scale.  The  action  which  is  determined  by  foreign 
causes  is  one  in  regard  to  which  the  organism  acts 
as  if  inorganic,  and  in  so  far  as  the  action  tends  to 
alter  it,  it  tends  also  to  lower  it  in  the  scale." 

W.  K.  CLIFFORD. 

TO-DAY  I  have  been  thinking  of  our 
old  way  of  talking  of  your  interests,  and 
I  have  been  wondering  why  is  not  the 
building  of  character  more  emphasised 
by  your  church — strength  in  principles, 
[146] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

veracity,  clean  honour.  You  agree  with 
me  that  character  ranks  in  importance 
beyond  all  else.  But  the  very  confes- 
sional upon  which  you  put  such  em- 
phasis, disintegrates  and  hinders  such 
growth.  It  weakens  by  taking  away  re- 
sponsibility for  one's  acts.  It  endeavours 
to  do  away  with  the  eternal  law  that  the 
breaking  of  the  moral  law  is  visited  with 
penalties  and  pains  just  as  the  breaking 
of  the  laws  of  physical  nature  has  its  in- 
evitable consequence.  The  "what  sins 
ye  forgive  these  shall  be  forgiven"  of  the 
archbishop  at  the  consecration  of  priests 
is  a  travesty.  And  its  practice  results  in 
weak  and  dependent  characters.  Some 
minds  recognize  this  even  in  your  church. 
Frassinnetti  writes,  "  Those  persons — in- 
variably women — who  would  wish  to  go 
to  confession  every  day  are  generally 
ninnies,  and  the  more  frequently  they 
confess  the  more  silly  do  they  become" 
an  unconscious  estimate  of  the  elevating 
grace  supposed  to  lie  in  the  sacrament. 
Ah,  if  your  sense  of  moral  responsi- 
[147] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

bility  were  greater — were  as  great  as  that 
of  the  average  non-Catholic,  if  I  must  say 
it.  But  you  were  bred  in  that  weakness 
which  the  confessional  inculcates,  and 
you  have  all  the  strengthlessness  that 
inheres  from  it.  Irresponsibility  for  acts 
is  one  of  these. 

The  higher  law  of  God,  one  of  the 
great  primary  moral  laws,  you  break  in 
order  to  obey  a  minor  ephemeral  law  of 
the  church  in  its  government — the  very 
point  I  have  made  against  your  faith, 
that  it  exalts  that  which  is  passing,  tran- 
sient, puny,  over  that  which  is  eternal, 
which  will  last  as  long  as  men  last.  You 
do  not  distinguish  between  a  command 
of  the  church — sometimes  the  residuum 
of  the  desiccation  and  dyspepsia  of  a 
body  of  men  in  foregone  centuries — and 
the  immutable  moral  laws  that  have 
ruled  all  men  and  all  sects.  The  com- 
mand is  of  greater  importance  to  your 
mind  than  the  law.  It  humbles  me  to 
think  I  can  be  sacrificed  to  such  obser- 
vance. 

[148] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

And  why  set  aside  all  the  facts  and  ex- 
periences of  life  in  religious  considera- 
tions ?  Why  not  use  them  as  criteria  in 
matters  of  theology,  as  well  as  in  other 
occasions  of  life  ?  You  should  have  had 
my  father  to  teach  you  to  ask  "Is  it  so?" 
—no  matter  what  your  authority.  You 
can  reason  as  well  as  the  next  man. 
Does  your  reason  justify  such  conclu- 
sions? That  this  man  says  this,  or  that 
man  says  that,  is  of  little  importance  to 
me  in  thinking  out  my  own  belief— 
merely  humanly  interesting  to  see  what 
others  have  thought  out.  I  could  not 
accept  your  faith  because  it  is  disproved 
by  all  the  facts  and  experiences  of  my 
own  life,  and  by  the  history  of  the  human 
race.  When  you  would  carry  converts 
into  Romanism  by  an  emotional  tide, 
that  is  justifiable  in  church  contention. 
But  when  you  endeavour  to  lead  them  by 
the  great  logic  of  the  world,  the  matter  is 
laughable. 

Yes,  with  your  premises  your  conclu- 
sions follow  logically  enough.     You  as- 
[149] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

sume  a  bad-tempered  man  up  in  the  sky 
—a  fancy  of  men  when  they  thought  the 
earth  was  flat — who  is  revengeful  and 
bloodthirsty  and  who  has  you  in  his  grip. 
And  you  must  reason  that  this  God's 
wickedness  has  made  a  hell.  To  a 
broader  life  of  present-day  conceptions 
you  prefer  going  each  day  to  your  church 
and  stiffening  the  credulity  of  ignorant 
and  decrepit  brains  by  practice  of  your 
hocus-pocus.  The  same  time  spent  in 
exposition  of  modern  conceptions  of  duty, 
of  truth,  of  humanity — how  much  greater 
the  results !  And  with  the  same  brains  for 
subjects,  too.  Your  slavery  is  one  the 
government  ought  to  interfere  with.  If  a 
body  of  young  men  without  knowledge 
or  experience  of  what  it  meant  were  annu- 
ally selling  themselves  and  entering  a 
bondage  which  reason,  all  human  truth 
and  modern  science  proved  most  shame- 
ful— don't  you  think  the  laws  would  be 
justified  in  interfering  ? 

God  is  vague,  indefinite,  and  far-away 

in  all  but  the  Catholic  religion?     But  is 
[150] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

not  God  vague  and  far  away  in  your 
actual  experiences  in  life?  Do  you  ever 
see  the  eternal  power,  or  feel  by  direct 
material  sense  of  touch  ?  Can  you  in  any 
reason  see  its  workings  except  in  great 
and  general  ways  ?  To  believe  in  a  good, 
all-directing  power,  which  shows  itself 
in  stern,  unvarying  law  and  in  vast  secu- 
lar movements,  is  not  that  faith  beside 
which  your  puny  belief,  and  gross  materi- 
alism of  the  Host,  grows  pale,  oh,  you  of 
little  faith?  Are  not  life's  revelations  of 
God  just  as  much  and  no  more  diffuse 
and  vague?  Are  we  justified  in  saying 
more  from  all  that  mankind  has  experi- 
enced or  discovered  throughout  all  time, 
and  over  all  the  world? — which  will 
stand  all  tests  ? 

They  have  told  you  tremendous  stories 
of  the  power  and  wrath  of  their  God. 
They  have  frightened  you  as  nurses  ter- 
rify children  with  fanciful  hobgoblins 
who  will  destroy  them  if  they  do  not 
obey.  This  your  superiors  have  done. 
You  are  their  children.  Their  hobgoblin 
[151] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

is  a  vindictive  God.  Possibly  they  be- 
lieve the  tale  themselves.  Probably  not. 
Sometimes  they  may  mention  a  God  of 
love,  but  do  they  not  act  as  if  they  were 
the  privy  council  of  a  tyrant — as  cruel 
and  bloodthirsty  as  ever  defiled  this  fair 
earth  ?  The  great  truths  upon  which  the 
church  was  founded  have  been  lost  sight 
of  in  a  mass  of  rules,  regulations,  and  en- 
actments which  have  greater  weight  with 
the  multitude,  and  indeed  with  the  eso- 
teric priesthood  itself,  than  the  funda- 
mental moral  precepts.  You  should  read 
Spencer  on  theological  bias. 

But  what  of  God? — you  repeat.  I  do 
not  know.  To  speak  properly  thereof  is 
beyond  speech.  A  certain  inscrutable 
power  is  always  revealing  itself  in  life. 
Your  nature  perceives  it.  Let  us  ask 
nothing  more.  Let  us  go  on  our  way 
clasping  each  other's  hands  and  with 
bowed  heads  and  self-abnegation  in  our 
soul.  That  is  all.  For  ourselves  no 
care.  Let  us  think  of  others  and  do  our 

duty.     We  never  trust  so  profoundly  as 
[152] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART*" 

when  we  forget  ourselves.  Let  us  go  for- 
ward without  hope,  or  repining,  or  any 
personal  exaction.  That  is  the  highest 
faith. 

You  once  told  me  with  a  smile  that  you 
had  exorcists  in  your  church — men  who 
drive  out  evil  spirits  by  incantations — and 
you  added  that  they  do  not  do  that  thing 
nowadays.  But  that  priests  do  not  use 
their  exorcising  formulas  is  merely  one  of 
the  concessions  the  church  has  been  forced 
to  make  to  the  spirit  of  our  time — which 
it  has  been  ridiculed  into  making.  Other 
concessions  will  also  be  wrung  from  its 
divinity.  Your  brethren  used  to  exorcise 
the  devil  from  goats  and  such  like.  We 
still  have  records  telling  of  such  illumi- 
nated proceedings. 

But  why,  if  the  church  has  all  elements 
of  righteousness,  does  it  not  correct  the 
perceptions  to  truth  and  quicken  the 
moral  sense  of  the  mass  of  Catholics? 
They  have  been  in  its  keeping  these  hun- 
dreds of  years — indeed  they  are  the  fruits 
[153] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

of  its  teachings.  And  yet  look.  Con- 
sider the  moral  status  of  the  Catholics 
who  have  immigrated  here.  Of  the  Ital- 
ians it  is  as  true  as  when  Shelley  wrote 
that  their  religion  "is  adoration,  faith, 
submission,  penitence,  blind  admiration; 
not  a  rule  for  moral  conduct.  It  has  no 
necessary  connection  with  any  one  virtue. 
The  most  atrocious  villain  may  be  rig- 
idly devout,  and,  without  any  shock  to 
established  faith,  confess  himself  to  be 
so."  Here  with  us  only  the  other  day  two 
Italians  knocked  down  a  man,  rifled  his 
pockets,  and  left  him  insensible — or 
dead,  they  did  not  know  which.  An 
hour  or  two  after  they  were  arrested 
while  praying  before  the  shrine  of  a  saint 
into  whose  receptacle  they  had  put 
half  of  their  plunder — to  buy  off  the 
saint  and  to  gain  his  good-will  and  pro- 
tection. 

I  am  not  to  judge  of  the  moral  teach- 
ings of  the  church  by  the  miserable  and 
ignorant,  but  go  to  the  prosperous  Catho- 
lics?    Ah,  then  it  is  not  a  question  of 
[154] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

church  and  its  teachings — it  is  simply  a 
question  of  civilisation  external  to  the 
church.  The  more  prosperous  Catholics 
meet  with  and  learn  from  the  advance 
guard  of  civilisation.  The  church  has 
no  hand  in  the  matter.  But  its  claims 
are  the  other  way.  You  say  more  than  I 
against  your  faith.  I  know,  however, 
that  civilisation  will  move  on;  and  the 
church  will  move  on  in  the  future  as  in 
the  past  among  the  lame  and  impotent 
of  the  rear  guard — unless,  indeed,  it 
teaches  that  form  and  ritual  and  ecclesi- 
astical observance  will  not  save  their 
immortal  part,  but  solely  pure  thoughts, 
clean  hearts,  speaking  the  truth,  right- 
eous doings  to  one's  neighbors.  With  all 
this  the  church  may  have  set  out,  but  its 
teaching  of  the  ethical  code,  the  spirit, 
has  been  so  preyed  upon  by  the  fungus 
growth  of  material  form  and  canonical  ob- 
servance that  ritual  has  become  the  prime 
thing  and  the  soul  of  the  teaching  is 
withered.  God  is  in  reality  broad-minded. 
Hence  the  emphasis  of — the  use  of — any 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

ritual  is  a  detraction  from  God's  inherent 
greatness 

The  highest  and  most  fruitful  upbuild- 
ing of  our  lives  is  character,  as  we  were 
saying,  and  that  your  institutions  and 
your  faith  destroy.  Just  so  far  as  coun- 
tries are  Catholicised,  just  so  far  is  there 
stagnation.  Morals  are  at  low  ebb,  and 
the  mind  and  material  resources  of  the 
people  either  undeveloped  or  impover- 
ished to  support  the  priesthood.  Just  so 
far  are  the  relations  of  men  and  women 
degraded,  and  personal  liberty,  inde- 
pendence, and  grace  of  character  of  less 
estimate.  The  Catholic  has  not  the 
right  of  independent  judgment  regarding 
the  great  questions  and  acts  of  life.  A 
Catholic  is  not  free,  and  freedom — in 
which  character  may  grow — is  the  dear- 
est of  earthly  possessions.  Without  free- 
dom life  is  a  curse. 


[156] 


XVII, 

In  all  situations  women  have  more  cause  for  suffering 
than  men  and  they  suffer  more.  The  man  has  strength 
and  the  power  of  exercising  it;  he  acts,  moves,  thinks, 
occupies  himself;  he  looks  ahead  and  sees  consolation 
in  the  future.  .  .  .  But  the  woman  stays  at  home;  she  is 
always  face  to  face  with  the  grief  from  which  nothing 
distracts  her;  she  goes  down  to  the  depths  of  the  abyss 
which  yawns  before  her,  measures  it,  and  often  fills  it 
with  her  tears  and  prayers.  To  feel,  to  love,  to  suffer, 
to  devote  herself — is  not  this  the  sum  of  woman's  life  ? 

BALZAC. 

You  have  promised  to  write  and  you 
do  not.  My  heart  misgives  me.  Are  you 
ill  ? — you  who  are  far  away  in  a  prison — 
you  whom  I  love.  What  awful  thing  has 
come  upon  you  ?  The  agony  that  is  with 
me  night  and  day  because  I  have  no 
word  and  because  I  am  inextricably 

bound  up  in  your  being — if  you  could  for 
[157] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

a  moment  understand  you  would  pity 
and  come  or  send  a  word. 

Do  you  remember  two  years  ago  when 
you  used  to  say  you  were  miserable  if  a 
day  passed  without  your  seeing  me  ?  And 
do  you  remember  one  evening  we  could 
not  agree  and  we  chanced  to  meet  next 
day  in  the  rain  by  the  old  burying- 
ground?  Your  face  that  day — how  it 
tore  my  soul!  And  you  remember  how 
you  came  home  writh  me,  the  rain  still 
falling,  and  we  sat  together  on  the  broad 
divan,  and  I  put  my  arms  round  you  and 
kissed  you,  and  the  impenetrable  sorrow 
of  your  countenance  melted  away  ?  Have 
you  forgotten  those  days  ?  Is  your  heart 
hardened  towards  me?  What  have  I 
done  ?  God  knows  I  have  sacrificed  every 
conservative  feeling — those  which  control 
my  former  associates — in  which  I  was 
bred. 

I  cannot  find  peace.  If  I  lie  down  to 
help  my  aching  head  and  back,  my  brain 
begins  its  wearisome  retrospection  and 

searching  inquiries  of  our  life  together, 
U581 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

and  suggests  such  possible  torture  in  the 
future  that  I  rise  in  a  frenzy  and  rush 
nervously  here  and  there  to  ease  the  men- 
tal pain.  What  word  has  been  spoken  ? 
Do  you  not  see  that  the  only  way  is  to 
be  frank  and  fearlessly  honest,  and  never 
do  a  cowardly  thing  and  negate  the  puls- 
ing, loving,  human  heart  God  has  given 
you?  Don't  you  know  that  loyalty  to 
one's  affections  is  a  noblest  virtue  ? — to  be 
true  to  the  best  in  us  ?  If  once  again 
there  could  be  between  us  the  old  confi- 
dence and  the  old  trust. 

I  have  been  longing  to  see  you  ever 
since  I  awoke — but  then  I  long  to  see  you 
all  the  time.  Your  face  is  before  me 
awake  or  asleep.  It  comes  with  a  pe- 
culiar, flower-like  beauty.  I  have  told 
you  this  before.  At  times  it  seems  like  a 
blossom — a  human  blossom.  I  think  of 
you,  my  sensitive  plant,  devoting  yourself 
to  your  enslaved,  unawakened  poor,  they 
not  able  to  comprehend  your  tender  spirit, 
and  I  say  what  is  the  meaning  of  it  and 

whither  does  the  finger  of  God  point? 
[159] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

Their  ignorance  and  pitifulness  does  not 
let  them  perceive  that  their  priest's  posi- 
tion is  absurd  and  that  he  has  need  to  mas- 
querade. They  misconceive  his  nature, 
think  him  different  from  other  men,  and 
he  knows  if  they  are  undeceived  a  great 
part  of  his  power  over  them  is  lost.  And 
so  he  keeps  up  the  hypocrisy — at  times 
with  such  a  physiognomy  as  Father  Oran's 
as  a  result. 

Do  not  put  me  out  of  your  mind  and 
out  of  your  heart,  but  rather  go  with 
energy  and  resolution  about  your  work. 
And  every  noon  when  in  coming  back 
you  do  not  find  me  waiting  with  kisses 
and  cheering  words,  say  in  your  mind, 
"She  is  not  here  and  is  therefore  heavy- 
hearted."  And  at  night,  when  you  re- 
turn again,  say,  "Still  she  has  not  come. 
God  hasten  her  coming  and  keep  her 
stout-hearted  during  the  weary  waiting." 
Oh,  you  who  believe  in  the  service  of  the 
lips,  have  you  ever  prayed  God  to  give 
us  to  each  other?  Have  you  ever  lived 

up  to  your  teachings  in  that  thing?    Re- 
[160] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

member  Gregory:  Deus  vult  rogari,  vult 
cogi,  vult  quadam  importunitate  vinci. 
Ask  God,  force  God,  conquer  God  with 
your  prayers.  You  must.  We  must. 

As  I  sit  afar  and  endeavour  to  gaze 
calmly  at  you,  you  seem  like  the  old 
Rhodian  marble — the  priest — the  Lao- 
coon — crushed  against  the  altar  by  a 
serpent  that  has  fastened  you  in  its  coils. 
You  sit  horrified  and  transfixed  by  the 
fierce  and  vindictive  strength  striking  at 
your  very  heart  with  poison. 

Do  not  desert  me.  Let  us  have  faith 
in  our  future.  You  would  not  take  away 
my  faith  in  you  as  the  gentlest,  truest 
and  most  tender-hearted  of  God's  crea- 
tures. I  cannot  harm  you.  God  is  with 
us  when  we  are  together,  and  prompts 
all  my  feelings  and  thoughts  towards  you. 
Yours  in  your  most  Sacred  Heart  sends 
you  a  thousand  kisses.  I  write  again  to- 
morrow. "The  time  for  silence  is  past, 
and  the  time  for  speaking  has  come," 
said  Luther  at  Worms.  "Here  I  stand, 

I  can  do  no  otherwise,  God  help  me.'* 
11  [161] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

Where  you  have  done  the  greatest 
wrong  is  herein — you  have  taken  from 
me  forever  my  life.  That  is  an  awful 
deprivation  of  any  human  soul.  It 
means  misery,  inaction,  death.  How  I 
should  have  joyed  and  sweetened  and 
grown  to  larger  nature  under  the  love  of 
The  One,  and  how  great  a  return  I 
should  have  made  him  for  all  his  love,  I 
cannot  measure.  Now  it  is  passed  for- 
ever. I  cannot  live  with  your  love,  and 
I  cannot  marry  another  with  our  love  in 
the  past.  What  shall  I  do?  Sit  and 
gnaw  my  soul  in  remorse  for  the  passion- 
ate vows  and  kisses  you  gave?  They 
were  sunshine.  All  the  rest  is  dreary 
shadow — resignation  and  black  death. 

It  stabs  me  when  I  think  there  are  no 
more  of  the  dear  confidences,  the  saying, 
"  I  looked  at  your  window  as  I  drove  past 
late  last  night^  and  wondered  if  you  were 
dreaming  of  me;"  the  beautiful  letters 
shy  and  tender  like  yourself;  the  telling 
family  joys  and  sorrows;  the  talk  about 

the  last  books.     A  great  pain  enters  my 
[162] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

heart  while  I  think  of  this,  and  finds  the 
house  deserted  and  confused.  And  the 
pain  grows  and  increases  until  it  would 
fain  burst  the  poor  gnawn  dwelling  for 
its  own  relief.  Oh,  if  it  would,  and  let 
out  the  life-blood  which  pulses  for  you. 

The  strength  of  our  love  is  possibly  in 
our  essential  differences.  What  you  take 
lightly  has  for  me  all  that  lies  in  the  life 
of  a  mortal  between  birth  and  death. 
You  ask  for  my  love,  and  talk  in  sweet- 
est confidences  of  our  married  life,  and 
within  forty-eight  hours  you  say  lightly 
as  you  swing  off  to  your  train : 

"But,  dear,  I  never  can." 

"Can  what?" 

"Marry  you." 

And  I  cling  to  you  crying,  "  Dear  heart, 
you  kill  me.  Remember  what  you  have 
said  and  done.  Do  not  say  that." 

"  But  I  cannot.  My  faith  I  cannot  un- 
believe." 

"Darling,  my  precious,"  I  cry,  "re- 
member what  you  have  said.  Say  one 

hopeful  word  before  you  go.     Do  not 

[163] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

hurry.  Just  one  word  of  hope."  And 
you  put  your  arms  about  me,  and  your 
lips  close  to  my  ear,  and  whisper,  "Love, 
love,  I  shall  always  love  you." 

I  sink  back.  You  are  gone.  And  I 
am  not  satisfied. 

These  long,  long  hours  of  doubt!  The 
ache  at  the  base  of  the  brain,  the  cease- 
less turning  of  body  and  soul !  I  am  fixed 
fast  in  a  position  where  I  would  have 
sworn  I  could  never  be — to  despise  the 
powers  that  govern  a  man  and  his  very 
motives,  and  yet  to  love  him  with  such 
adoration  that  my  reason  will  not,  or  can- 
not, subdue  my  devotion. 

In  the  eternal  Nemesis,  I  say,  God  will 
make  the  church  pay  for  such  pain  and 
sorrow  which  I  for  other  women  suffer. 
By  a  child's  accident  I  met  you  and  could 
not  help  loving  you.  Love  came,  I  did 
not  seek  it.  God  gave  it,  and  such  gift 
is  not  to  contemn,  to  put  aside,  to  tear 
from  my  heart  if  I  were  able.  Life  to  me 

was  sanctified,  made  sweeter  and  broader 
[164] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

because  of  the  love.  I  loved  you  and 
therefore  loved  more  and  more  steadily 
all  the  world. 

"No,"  said  the  church,  "the  love  of  a 
man  for  a  woman — his  love  for  you — or 
of  a  woman  for  a  man — your  love  for 
him — is  impure,  degrading,  unholy" 
that,  when  it  was  heaven  to  be  under  the 
same  roof  with  you  and  rapture  to  touch 
your  hand — "the  purest  life  is  the  life 
destitute  of  the  devotion  and  love  you 
feel.  I  have  him.  He  is  mine.  As  a  boy 
he  promised  to  obey  me  and  to  prostrate 
himself  before  my  pronunciamentos  old 
and  new.  It  is  a  sin  for  him  to  utter  one 
word  of  endearment,  to  press  you  in  a 
caress,  or  to  think  of  you  with  a  single 
loving  thought." 

Your  sad  face  has  been  coming  be- 
tween me  and  my  book  all  day,  and  I 
stop  here  in  the  middle  of  reading  to 
speak  this  little  message.  Life  is  hard 
without  you.  It  is  hard  to  go  about  and 

force  a  factitious  interest  in  the  day  and 
[165] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

its  works,  the  heart  ever  hungry  and 
starving  for  a  kind  touch  or  loving  word. 
A  hundred  times  a  day  the  consciousness 
of  it  pushes  itself  through  my  will  and  its 
attempted  interests.  I  have  hoped  con- 
stantly against  overwhelming  odds,  and 
now  even  that  hope  is  gone.  And  you, 
love  of  my  soul,  is  it  so  with  you?  If  it 
were,  would  you  do  as  you  do?  I  fear 
the  letter  I  wrote  Sunday  misrepresents 
me.  I  want  to  see  you — I  crave  to  see 
you — does  the  letter  say  that? 

Have  you  seen  the  number  of  the 
"  Catholic  Review"  which  founds  an  argu- 
ment for  the  development  of  Christian 
doctrine  on  the  scientific  doctrine  of  evo- 
lution? Shades  of  all  the  martyrs  the 
church  has  burned  to  snuff  out  science! 
How  massively  impudent!  If  the  church 
admits  the  belief  of  logical  and  scientific 
development,  there  is  an  end  to  its  papal 
infallibility  and  the  infallibility  of  coun- 
cils— those  things  to  the  decrees  of  which 
you  are  a  bonded  slave.  You  are  free. 

Your  spiritual  mother  would  have  had  a 
[166] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

public  roasting  of  the  writer  three  hun- 
dred years  ago  (when  the  laws  you  obey 
were  made)  if  he  had  hinted  at  a  tenth 
of  the  notion.  The  world  moves,  but 
what  with  popes  and  councils  it  has  a 
tremendous  weight  pulling  it  back  in  its 
effort  for  human  freedom  and  human 
advancement. 

In  turning  over  an  old  number  of  an- 
other magazine  I  find  this  sentence:  "But 
of  all  tragedies  that  are  ever  enacted 
within  the  theatre  of  the  human  mind, 
what  one  is  so  pitiable  as  that  in  which  a 
pure  being  prays  to  be  forgiven  that  one 
feeling  of  nature  which  is  the  revelation 
of  all  beauty,  the  secret  of  all  perfection, 
the  solace  of  the  world  and  the  condition 
of  immortality."  Could  the  writer  have 
known  you  ?  Then  on  another  page  you 
find  that  the  pope's  brief  for  Talleyrand's 
secularisation — Talleyrand  the  bishop- 
was  dated  from  St.  Peter's  at  Rome,  the 
29th  of  June,  1802.  Do  you  remember 
you  have  told  me  insistently  that  such 

instrument  had  not  been  issued  during 
[167] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

this  last  century?    You  know  so  little  of 
the  mechanism  that  restrains  you! 

I  have  sometimes  thought  I  was  a  mir- 
ror to  your  feelings  and  passions,  I  feel 
so  intensely  what  you  tell  me  that  you 
feel.  Rossetti  touches  this  in  the  sonnet 
where  his  beloved  gives  back  no  image 
to  the  protests  of  the  one  she  does  not 
love,  but  reflects  the  passion  of  the  true 
lover.  It  is  this  thing  in  woman  which  in 
its  abuse  leads  to  the  seraglio.  For  if  a 
woman  truly  and  devotedly  loves  a  man 
— such  a  woman  as  I,  such  a  man  as  you 
— the  outside  world  is  of  little  value 
except  as  it  touches  her  sympathy  for 
humanity.  As  the  position  of  women  now 
is  in  our  present  social  order,  she  is  hap- 
piest in  staying  much  by  herself  and  giv- 
ing herself  to  love  thoughts  of  him,  glad 
to  leave  the  world- struggle  with  him. 
This  is  true.  I  feel  the  instinct,  and  I 
long  to  yield  to  it. 


[168] 


XVIII. 

To  her  fair  \vorks  did  Nature  link 
The  human  soul  that  through  me  ran; 
And  much  it  grieved  my  heart  to  think 
What  Man  has  made  of  Man. 

WORDSWORTH. 

THANK  you,  best  beloved  of  all  men,  for 
your  letter  of  Friday.  It  came  yesterday 
morning  at  half-past  eleven  and  took  the 
weight  of  fear  that  you  were  ill  from  my 
mind.  When  I  heard  his  whistle  I  ran 
to  watch  the  postman  crossing  from 
house  to  house  far  down  the  long  avenue. 
Hunger  for  some  word  from  you  was 
gnawing  at  me.  At  last  he  came  up  under 
our  elms  and  oh,  the  sure  joy  I  felt  the 
news  was  from  you!  It  was  sweet  of  you 
to  try  and  get  the  letter  to  me  by  an  early 
mail.  Nothing  touches  one  quicker  than 

affectionate  care  like  that.    You  seem  as 
1169] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

you  used  in  the  days — it  is  long  now — 
when  we  both  had  hope  and  trust  and 
stood  together  facing  our  difficulties  hand 
in  hand. 

An  hour  before  the  letter  came  I  was 
anxious  enough  not  to  control  myself  and 
I  sent  a  post-card.  After  I  posted  it  I 
remembered  that  I  left  the  ti  off  scrip- 
sisti — but  I  know  your  violet  eyes  will 
read  it  aright.  The  occurrence  reminds 
me  of  Heine's  "Den  Romern  wurde 
gewiss  nicht  Zeit  genug  ubrig  geblieben 
sein,  die  Welt  zu  erobern,  wenn  sie  das 
Latein  erst  hatten  lernen  sollen.  Diese 
glucklichen  Leute  wussten  schon  in  der 
Wiege,  welche  Nomina  den  accusativ  auf 
im  haben."  As  for  your  daily  quota  of 
Latin,  I  watch  the  hands  of  my  watch 
every  morning  and  on  Sundays  breathe  a 
sigh  of  relief  when  I  see  it  is  half-past 
twelve,  and  know  your  little  play  in  that 
dead  tongue  is  over  for  the  day — for  the 
morning,  at  least. 

You  are  unhappy,  you  say,  and  crave 

something,  you  do  not  know  what.    But 
[170] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

I  know.  It  is  some  response  to  your 
nature  that  you  crave.  You  have  none 
as  you  now  live.  Do  you  think  if  we  were 
married — if  after  your  repulse  I  may  make 
such  a  suggestion — and  each  had  the  ut- 
most confidence  and  trust  in  the  love  and 
steadfastness  of  the  other  that  you  would 
" crave  something"?  No.  The  craving 
would  cease,  for  there  would  be  the  out- 
put— expression — of  yourself  which  is 
natural  to  every  normal  human  being. 
You  live  shut  down  upon,  shut  off,  ne- 
gating yourself  in  the  strongest  of  all  im- 
pulses to  express  yourself.  Craving  for 
action  and  expression  and  unsatisfied 
longing  are  the  mother  of  unhappiness. 
You  would  grow  mentally,  morally,  phys- 
ically, if  you  would  give  yourself  expres- 
sion, and  the  craving  and  unhappiness 
would  become  a  weary  memory.  When 
I  write  to  you  in  this  way  I  do  not  refer 
to  one  desire  alone,  but  to  all  emotions 
and  actions — and  yet  every  feeling  and 
thought  in  men  and  women  is  allied  to 

the  one.     For  your  generous,  exuberant 
[171] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

nature  which  would  find  its  fairest  ideal 
in  domestic  life  there  is  but  one  road  to 
happiness — marriage  with  her  whom  you 
love  and  trust,  who  trusts  and  loves  you. 
This  is  my  only  answer  to  your  words  of 
craving.  I  crave  something,  too,  but  I 
know  definitely  what.  I  am  sorry  you 
are  worried  and  anxious  and  upset.  It 
hurts  me  that  you  are  not  better.  You 
know  we  thought  you  would  be  after 
you  had  rid  yourself  of  your  incubus — 
me. 

You  say  it  is  best  for  us  to  be  sepa- 
rated. And  are  we  not  ?  What  more  do 
you  want?  Will  you  not  be  explicit? 
If  the  Jesuits  had  not  trained  you  in 
their  tergiversation  I  could  understand — 
could  have  understood  you — better.  But 
their  training — ah,  God! — kills  strength 
and  self-reliance  and  sun-clear  truth  in 
every  mind  they  have  the  formation  of. 
Their  teachings  are  a  sirocco  to  fair 
natures.  They  blast  and  wither  and  shrivel 
the  most  generous  and  sweet  growths. 

Many  of  your  faith  think  as  I  in  this 
[172] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

regard.  The  popes  and  Catholic  mon- 
archs  who  have  endeavoured  to  suppress 
the  order  have  thought  as  I  and  as  I 
here  write. 

In  a  volume  of  Milton's  prose  which  I 
lately  had  in  my  hands  I  find  this  pas- 
sage which  bears  out  what  I  have  here- 
tofore said.  Martin  Bucer  dicit:  "So 
there  are  many  canons  and  laws  extant 
whereby  priests,  if  they  married,  were 
removed  from  their  office;  yet  it  is  not 
read  that  their  marriage  was  dissolved 
as  the  papists  nowadays  do,  or  that 
they  were  excommunicated;  nay,  ex- 
pressly, they  might  communicate  as  lay 
men."  And  again,  "Some  persons  are 

so  ordained     to     marriage and 

therein  every  one  is  to  be  left  to  his 
own  judgment  and  conscience,  and  not 
to  have  a  burden  laid  upon  him  by  any 
other." 

In  all  this  great  world  I  want  nothing 
else  but  you — just  your  sweet  presence— 
and  why  shall  I  not?    Oh,  to  have  you 
[173] 


A  WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  hold  you  and  know  you  were  all 
mine  for  a  lifetime,  forever.  I  could 
thank  God  for  this  gift  of  life  then. 
Think  of  the  little  house  by  the  sea  where 
we  have  so  often  lived  in  fancy.  Think 
again  how  sweet  it  would  be  to  dwell 
there  quite  alone  together — you  and  I — 
working  and  joying — you  reading  to  me 
and  I  to  you  from  our  sure-minded  books 
— you  still  clinging  to  Doctor  Angelicus 
and  Doctor  Seraphicus.  Think  of  the 
fawn-coloured  sides  and  meek  eyes  of  the 
Jersey  you  would  milk  and  from  whose 
milk  I  should  make  butter,  and  whipped 
cream,  and  beautiful  white  curd  cheese. 
Think  of  our  little  road  wagon  and  horse 
with  which  we  should  drive  to  the  village 
after  post  and  household  necessities,  all 
the  way  under  boughs  of  old  apple-trees 
and  kindly-minded  elms.  And  think  of 
the  berries  I  should  pick,  which  you 
would  declare  were  the  juiciest  and  most 
aromatic  berries  you  ever  pressed  upon 
your  tongue.  Think,  too,  of  the  sweet 

rye  bread  and  brown  bread  and  white 
[174] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

bread  I  should  make  for  your  butter  and 
cream  curds  and  berries.  How  tenderly 
I  should  watch  over  you,  looking  into  the 
dear  eyes  every  morning  to  see  if  the 
love-light  were  shining,  and  kissing  you 
good-night  with  the  quiet  stars  blinking 
assent  through  the  window-pane. 

Let  us  tell  it  to  the  world,  dear.  Let 
us  make  it  frank  and  honest.  Let  us 
take  each  other  by  the  hand  and  go  out 
into  the  world.  We  cannot  fail  when  we 
have  faith  in  each  other,  and  hope,  and 
love.  I  shall  always  be  patient  and  sweet. 
Men  will  applaud  you  and  women  who 
think  and  feel  will  uphold  me.  For 
others — quid  interest?  Do  not  ask  me 
to  give  you  up  utterly.  It  means  desola- 
tion. You  would  not  take  away  all  my 
life.  All  of  us  humans — and  women  ever 
— crave  sympathy  and  love.  You  are 
life.  You  would  not  leave  me.  You  are 
better  and  nobler  married  to  me  than  to 
your  church.  You  would  not  then  be 
living  a  lie.  All  day  long  this  thought 

has  turned  in  my  brain.    If  I  drive  it  out 
[175] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

in  one  form  it  returns  in  another.  This 
life  as  we  now  live  it  is  cruel,  derisive,  and 
false.  God  always  punishes  such.  What 
penance  for  this  pretence  can  be  in  store 
for  us  ?  The  best  that  is  in  me  has  been 
choked  back  so  long!  Oh,  how  this 
falsity  and  unnaturalness  hurt!  I  can- 
not think  it  right.  Rather  it  is  a  most 
hideous  wrong. 

If  it  is  easiness  that  you  seek,  dearest, 
and  a  clear  conscience,  will  betraying  me 
to  a  confessor  give  it  to  you  ?  Would  you 
not  be  all  the  more  miserable  ?  For  you 
would  have  betrayed  and  deserted  one 
for  whom  you  protest  the  supremest  af- 
fection and  who  has  supreme  affection 
for  you.  Is  not  something  wrong  with 
teachings  which  inculcate  disloyalty  to 
one's  best  instincts?  Can  you  not  see 
it  is  bad  to  tell  another  whatever  terms 
of  endearment  have  passed  between  us? 
Why  not  confess  to  me?  I  will  give  you 
now  and  for  evermore  absolution  for  all 

but  acts  of  hesitation  and  evasion,  and  a 
[176] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

majority  of  the  world  would  tell  you  I 
am  just  as  good  and  holy,  and  my  abso- 
lution will  have  just  as  much  weight  with 
the  omnipotent  power  as  that  of  a  Paulist 
father  or  other  priest.  Ah,  I  feel  an 
enormous  anger  seize  me  when  I  think 
of  the  power  of  the  humbuggery  over  you. 
To  have  you  miserable  and  "penitent"! 
My  heart,  save  me  that  last  humiliation. 
To  have  my  love  for  you  served  up  to  a 
bunch  of  withered  old  sinners  who  pre- 
tend they  are  ashamed  of  the  nature  God 
gave  them.  Dearest,  dearest,  can  you  not 
see  that  it  is  ungodly,  inhuman,  this  de- 
mand that  is  made  of  you?  Why  will 
you  put  the  power  of  the  church  before 
the  power  of  Jesus,  and  the  commands  of 
ecclesiasticism  before  his  sweet,  simple 
dicta?  Would  he  not  tell  you  as  I  say, 
if  he  were  here  ?  He  would  certainly  say 
"Live  your  fullest  and  completest  life." 
You  and  I  know  what  your  fullest  and 
completest  life  is.  Oh,  I  fear  with  tears 
wetting  my  cheeks,  that  if  you  do  this 

thing,  a  contempt  for  the  one  I  love  best, 
12  [177] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  whom  I  hope  to  love  and  cherish 
immeasurably  to  my  dying  day,  will  grow 
within  me.  How  can  you  be  so  cruel— 
but  it  isn't  you! — to  take  the  only  hope 
and  only  desire  from  one  worn  by  vacil- 
lating promises  ? 

When  I  look  back  upon  the  long,  ex- 
hausting three  and  more  years  with  their 
pain  of  three  centuries,  there  are  several 
sudden  turns  to  your  sacerdotalism  which 
are  most  mysterious.  I  cannot  penetrate 
them.  Poor  fool,  I  have  gone  on  loving 
and  trusting  and  hoping,  and  now  I  want 
to  die.  I  wish  I  could  not  see  to-mor- 
row's daybreak.  Since  your  letter  came 
this  morning  the  birds'  songs  have  lost 
their  joyousness,  no  longer  do  the  trees 
swing  merrily  in  the  wind,  and  all  the 
time  the  iterating  thought  is  striking  me 
— why  does  the  sun  shine  ?  and  why  is  it 
all  just  as  it  was  before?  It  is  not  with 
me  just  as  it  was  before.  To  whom  shall 
I  turn?  The  one  who  was  my  joy  and 
strength  will  have  betrayed  me  in  a  few 
days.  Who  is  there  who  will  be  my  kind 
[178] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  sympathetic  friend  ?  Dear  heart,  I 
know  too  well  there  is  no  one.  I  must  go 
away  and  bury  my  misery  from  human 
eyes.  Did  not  Mrs.  Olney  say  right  that 
your  men  would  sacrifice  any  woman  to 
their  church?  Et  tu,  Brute?  Tell  me, 
is  there  any  place  in  the  world  where 
men  will  not  sacrifice  women  to  fetiches  ? 
I  would  go  there. 

Dear  soul,  I  have  written  this  between 
showers  of  tears.  If  it  is  wild  and  dis- 
cordant— my  mind  is  wild  and  discord- 
ant, too.  One  moment  I  think  and  tell 
myself,  "Say  to  him  calmly  to-morrow 
that  he  goes  to  his  confession  with  your 
full  consent  and  wish."  But  soon  I  am 
crying,  "Oh,  I  cannot  give  him  up,  I 
cannot  give  him  up."  If  I  could  make 
you  forget  your  ecclesiastical  past,  I 
would  not  give  you  up.  Priests  who 
have  married,  have  they  been  troubled, 
as  your  fears  are,  by  their  past?  Is  it 
really  true,  I  constantly  ask  myself,  that 
you  and  I  are  to  be  sacrificed  to  medi- 
aeval superstition  and  East-Indian  ascet- 
[179] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

icism?  Are  we  so  diverse  in  nature 
and  in  interests  that  that  which  whitens 
your  soul  befouls  mine,  and  that  which 
makes  mine  clean  condemns  yours  to 
perdition  ? 


[180] 


XIX. 

The  widest  land 

Doom  takes  to  part  us,  leaves  thy  heart  in  mine 
With  pulses  that  beat  double.    What  I  do 
And  what  I  dream  include  thee,  as  the  wine 
Must  taste  of  its  own  grapes.    And  when  I  sue 
God  for  myself,  He  hears  that  name  of  thine, 
And  sees  within  my  eyes  the  tears  of  two. 

ELIZABETH  BAKRETT  BROWNING. 

WHY  is  it  I  can  accept  your  faith,  but 
you  cannot  take  mine,  you  ask?  Here, 
now,  is  my  answer  at  half-past  eleven 
of  this  Sunday  morning,  and  within 
hearing  of  the  intoning  of  your  honey 
voice.  Because  mine  is  the  greater. 
When  you  asked  the  question  you  im- 
plied that  yours  had  some  secret  truth, 
some  subtle  essence  which  one  having 
once  tasted  could  never  do  without.  Not 
at  all — except  as  superstition  weakens  and 
[181] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

always  inclines  its  practiser  back  to   its 
ways. 

I  could  take  yours  as  a  ritual — what  it 
is — but  the  greatness  and  freedom  of 
mine  would  be  still  with  me.  I  could 
take  yours,  dear,  if  that  would  bring  you 
to  me,  or  me  to  you.  I  could  take  it  be- 
cause mine  is  great  enough  to  include  all. 
I  could  take  your  creed,  were  it  necessary, 
and  explain  it  in  philosophic  terms,  and 
enter  your  church  with  this  explanation. 
There  is  no  doubt  they  would  receive  me. 
A  proof  of  how  much  yours  is  form — that 
it  is  essentially  form — is  that  you  teach 
it  must  be  that  form,  that  ritual  alone 
to  ensure  the  soul's  salvation.  (When  I 
write  this  it  seems  as  if  it  could  not  be 
true,  as  if  a  sane  and  rational  creature 
could  not  hang  the  strength  and  inde- 
pendence of  his  life  upon  such  arbitrary 
law.  Yet  I  have  heard  it  preached  from 
your  pulpits.)  It  must  be  your  doxy  by 
which  you  stand.  Confess  to  me,  my 
penitent,  is  not  mine  the  broader,  more 
self-respecting,  more  independent,  more 
[182] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

rational  religion  ?  That  I  can  take  yours 
and  still  retain  my  own  shows  that  mine  is 
the  more  comprehensive  and  greater,  the 
more  truly  catholic — does  it  not? 

I  am  not  a  Catholic — from  your  point 
of  Catholicism — and  I  do  not  believe  God 
demands  human  sacrifice — sacrifice  of  that 
dearest  and  best  to  us.  Wherefore  I  do 
not  think  it  right  to  give  you  up.  If  I 
believed  in  human  sacrifice  I  should  urge 
you  to  act  as  you  do.  Yea,  if  I  believed, 
then  I  should  hold  my  saviour  in  my 
mouth.  But  you,  most  dear,  are  he  who 
can  save  me  and  turn  my  life  from  infinite 
misery  to  infinite  bliss.  Can  you  not  un- 
derstand, dear  heart  ?  Can  you  not  have 
a  glimmering  of  the  light  ?  I  crave  your 
sympathy  and  love  with  infinite  yearning. 
When  you  are  close  beside  me,  and  touch 
me  and  breathe  upon  me  and  look  into 
my  eyes,  you  know  I  believe  in  you  and 
adore  you.  But  you  are  more  to  me  than 
that,  you  are  divine.  Your  touch  burns 
and  your  sweet  breath  is  like  incense — I 

take  long  breaths  to  catch  its  fragrance, 
[183] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  I  cry  in  my  heart,  "Oh,  God,  melt 
and  merge  me  in  him.  Let  his  soul  be 
my  soul,  and  his  body  my  body,  and  his 
will  my  will."  To  be  individual,  one 
alone  separate  from  you,  is  agony.  I 
cling  to  you  and  pray  I  may  be  dis- 
solved in  you,  and  never  know  myself  any 
more.  You  would  be  my  Nirvana, 
most  dear,  and  no  East-Indian  zealot 
ever  longed  for  passionless  unconscious- 
ness as  I  long  with  passion  and  conscious- 
ness for  absorption  in  your  existence — 
your  life  and  being  and  feeling  and 
thought. 

When  I  heard  the  chimes  this  morning  I 
wanted  to  be  where  I  could  see  you,  and 
my  resolutions  were  so  chaotic  that  when 
this  afternoon  came  I  could  not  help  but 
go.  Once  there  I  dreamed  of  the  day  I 
got  back  from  Starcrest  and  the  changes 
that  have  come  in  the  six  months  since. 
How  like  a  wounded,  hunted  doe  I  felt 
that  day.  How  I  longed  for  your  pres- 
ence and  touch.  How  I  sat  weeping  in  a 
[184] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

dark  corner  till  the  women  had  finished 
their  beads  and  the  simple  creatures  had 
had  you  bless  their  scapulars.  Then  all 
the  fever  and  agony  of  the  endeavour  to 
get  away  from  you  swept  over  me  afresh— 
how  in  all  the  striving  I  only  loved  you 
more  and  felt  more  closely  drawn  to  you 
— if  that  were  possible. 

You  see  one  difficulty  is  that  ever  since 
I  knew  you  I  have  felt  you  were  a  part  of 
myself,  as  if  we  were  long  ago  a  complete 
whole — a  perfect  apple,  as  the  old  saying 
is — and  only  lately  the  two  halves  had 
again  found  each  other.  And  thus  sit- 
ting there  with  the  shrill  voices  chanting 
untunefully  still  ringing  in  my  ears,  I 
thought  how  often  you  had  been  in  that 
place,  how  many  times  your  foot  had 
pressed  the  red  carpet  about  the  altar- 
steps,  and  how  many  times  you  had  bent 
your  knee  and  pressed  your  lips  to  that 
inanimate  marble.  Your  ritual  seemed 
more  weak  and  puerile  than  ever,  for  it 
kept  forcing  upon  me  the  reasons  of  its 

growth  and  final  establishment.     "Is  it 
[185] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

possible  he  can  leave  me  for  this!"  I  ex- 
claimed. But  I  thought  afterward,  "It  is 
not  for  this  he  leaves  me.  And  he  has  not 
left  me  and  will  not  leave  me." 

Dear  heart,  I  cannot  tell  you  how 
many  prayers  I  have  that  you  will  grow 
stronger  in  your  vacation.  There  is  such 
wistfulness  in  the  dear  eyes — that  they 
were  here  to  kiss! — and  such  weariness 
in  the  dear  figure !  Oh,  I  want  it  to  be  so 
different.  You  should  be  glad  and  joy- 
ous in  the  fact  that  God  has  given  you  a 
body,  to  abuse  which  is  a  sin,  as  well  as 
a  soul ;  and  clear  in  the  thought  that  abuse 
of  the  body  must  result  in  a  depleted  soul 
and  depleted  character.  That  is  for  what 
I  contend,  not  only  for  your  soul  and  your 
character,  but  for  the  beautiful  body  God 
has  given  you.  Now  since  you  spend  fifty 
weeks  of  the  year  in  the  care  of  the  soul, 
won't  you  live  the  remaining  two  wholly 
for  your  body,  its  health  and  strengthen- 
ing ?  Let  the  sun  beat  down  upon  it  and 

redden  it  and  stimulate  the  skin.    Lie  in 
[186] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

the  heat  and  dream  and  doze.  I  have  a 
good  deal  more  to  say,  but  the  time  is  ten 
o'clock  and  I  must  send  this  to  the  post. 
I  send  you  a  thousand  kisses  for  good-by 
and  a  thousand  hopes  for  us  both.  I 
shall  think  of  you  every  moment,  and 
sometimes  speak  your  name,  half  dream- 
ing you  are  not  so  far  away  from  this  dull 
room. 

Did  you  ever  think  what  a  tremendous 
chance  the  pope  had — if  he  were  really  a 
great-minded  man  with  a  heart  of  love- 
to  unite  all  sects  and  all  creeds  ? — to  put 
away  the  puny,  narrow,  arbitrary  dog- 
mas which  barricade  him  from  the  real 
life  and  thought  and  onward  march  of 
the  world?  The  difference  after  all  is 
slight  between  Catholic  and  Protestant, 
Jew  and  Gentile — all  a  form  of  definition 
and  ritual.  They  are  all  humans.  Why, 
all  worshipping  the  same  God,  the  one 
original  source  of  all  power,  why  do  these 
humans  not  drop  husks  and  trivial  differ- 
ences and  absurd  ritual  and  meet  on  the 
[187] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

common  ground  of  human  fellowship? 
What  spiritual  progress  the  world  might 
see,  if  they  did!  But  I  notice  that  when 
the  Protestants  ease  up  and  hold  a  hand 
of  brotherhood  to  the  Catholics,  as  is  the 
present  tendency  in  our  country  to-day, 
the  Catholics  "get  in  their  work"  by 
wholesale  advertisements  at  proselytising. 
Many  are  like  myself  in  religion,  with  in- 
tellectual affiliations  with  advanced  radi- 
cals and  admiration  for  the  art  and  his- 
toric tradition  of  the  Catholics.  But 
because  of  the  inertness,  the  deadness  to 
any  but  past  centuries,  the  devitalising 
separation  of  your  church  from  the  eager, 
pulsing  life  of  to-day,  just  as  surely  as 
the  sun  goes  on  shining  and  no  cataclysm 
wipes  humanity  from  this  dancing  ball, 
just  so  surely  will  the  church  find  death 
throes  upon  it.  A  long  time  yet  it  may 
stand.  Stanley's  pygmies  may  need  it 
for  hundreds  of  years  to  come.  But  so 
surely  as  their  mental  maturity  is  reached, 
so  surely  is  its  destruction  complete. 

[188] 


A    WOMAN'S  HEART 

Because  I  cannot  see  you  immediately 
to  greet  you,  I  send  you  a  word  this  last 
Sunday  night  of  your  absence.  You  will 
come  to-morrow  according  to  the  dear 
letter  you  wrote,  and  according  to  the 
dear  post-card  all  in  Latin  which  reached 
me  yesterday.  Doctor  Peccavi  forgot  to 
post  the  letter  and  I  did  not  get  it  till  the 
Friday  after  you  had  written  it.  You  can- 
not think  of  my  joy  at  seeing  it.  I  read 
it,  and  kissed  it,  and  put  it  under  my  pil- 
low, and  had  the  first  real  rest  since  you 
disappeared  down  under  the  trees.  I 
have  so  many  questions,  and  what  an 
eager  desire  to  see  you!  You  are  brown 
and  better,  I  know.  But  what  have  you 
done  and  where  have  you  been?  Was 
the  water  blue  and  the  air  cool  ?  It  was 
hot  and  prostrating  here,  and  so  I  was 
glad  you  were  away.  I  prayed  God  every 
day  to  keep  you  and  make  you  well,  and 
bring  you  safe,  and  when  the  storms  have 
burst  upon  us  I  have  cried  in  heart, 
"Keep  him,  oh  infinite  power,  keep  him 

and  protect  him."     Oh,  to  see  you  and 
[189] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

touch  your  hand!  This  is  only  a  word 
of  welcome  home.  There  is  a  volume 
to  hear  and  tell. 


[1901 


XX. 

Love  is  not  love 

Which  alters  when  it  alteration  finds, 
Or  bends  with  the  remover  to  remove : — 
O  no !  it  is  an  ever-fixbd  mark 
That  looks  on  tempests,  and  is  never  shaken. 

SHAKESPEARE. 

I  MUST  see  you.  Again  I  tell  you  I  will 
not  kiss  or  touch  you  if  you  wish  me  not 
to.  But  I  must  speak  with  you.  Will 
you  come  this  week — Friday?  Thurs- 
day? 

The  letter  you  wrote  last  night  came 
an  hour  ago.  It  gives  me  most  awful 
agony.  I  am  ill  for  two  days,  a  prisoner 
in  my  room.  It  is  killing  me.  Oh,  you 
do  not  know  what  you  do  when  you  cast 
back  upon  me  this  great  love — which  has 
grown  to  such  strength  only  under  your 
expression  of  like  ardour.  God  will  pun- 
ish you,  I  fear,  for  your  contempt  for  the 
[191] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

sweetness  and  gentleness  he  has  put  in 
your  heart  for  me.  To  follow  that  and 
not  superstition  is  to  do  his  bidding  and 
be  true  to  your  duty. 

Dear  love,  I  cannot  write.  But  my 
poor  brain  will  turn  and  turn  all  this  after- 
noon and  night,  and  countless  other  days 
and  nights,  thinking  of  our  love  and  how 
I — we — builded  on  its  happiness.  Oh, 
you  cannot  be  false  to  all  you  have  said 
and  done — you  who,  I  have  said,  had  the 
truest  and  sweetest  loyalty  in  the  world. 
Do  you  think  God  can  countenance  a 
power  which  teaches  men  such  dishon- 
our? My  darling,  if  I  could  put  my 
arms  about  you,  and  talk  of  our  unities 
and  disunities  once  more! 

You  surely  are  ill.  You  cannot  be  so 
hard.  I  cannot  believe  it — I  cannot 
believe  it — that  one  whom  I  love  more 
than  life  and  all  else  would  sacrifice  me  to 
a  mass  of  barbarous  traditions  and  usages. 
The  impossibility  of  it  comes  upon  me 
afresh.  We  are  deluded.  It  is  a  hideous 

nightmare. 

[192] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

What  is  it  that  you  are  forced  to  study 
or  read  in  your  office  at  this  season  of  the 
year  that  so  terribly  works  upon  you  ? 
Last  winter  it  was  so.  Even  the  winter 
before,  in  the  newness  and  freshness  and 
abandon  of  your  decision  for  a  better  life, 
I  could  see  it.  What  is  prescribed  for  you 
that  makes  you  fear  ?  There  is  a  time  in 
the  summer,  too.  How  knowing  of  the 
church  frequently  to  put  something  in  her 
lessons  to  harrow  the  tenderer,  more  self- 
examining  soul !  Those  were  canny  crea- 
tures who  entrapped  you  and  prepared 
tortures  for  your  sensitiveness. 

It  seems  weeks  since  I  saw  you.  Every 
day  is  unending.  This  sleeplessness — I 
fear  the  madhouse  or  a  hospital.  If 
something  helpful  and  hopeful  happens 
— when  something  helpful  and  hopeful 
does  happen — I  shall  be  well  again.  God 
meant  each  of  us  to  have  a  portion  of 
sunshine.  But  men  make  us  go  long 
without  it  and  sicken. 

I  do  not  mean  to  cry  out  for  fear  it  will 

depress  you.     But  life  is  hard  just  now. 
13  [193] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

I  hold  my  face  in  my  hands  and  weep 
afresh  when  I  think  of  our  most  miser- 
able plight,  and  you  far  away.  I  wonder 
what  you  are  doing  at  five  o'clock  of  this 
afternoon.  Your  sympathetic  face  comes 
before  me.  Do  you  remember  how  you 
used  to  clasp  one  arm  about  me  and  pull 
down  my  collar  with  the  other  hand  and 
bite  my  throat,  and  say  to  my  protest, 
"But  I  like  to  bite  you."  You  bear! 

I  cannot  put  it  out  of  mind.  You  and 
our  long  yearning  I  cannot  put  away. 
It  has  been  the  great  serious  thing  of  life 
with  me.  It  overrides  all  else.  It  thrusts 
itself  between  me  and  every  duty.  It  is 
the  great  strength  of  my  life  to-day. 
What  can  I  do?  Between  me  and  this 
paper  upon  which  I  write  come  your  dear 
countenance,  your  eyes,  your  kisses  and 
repeated  protests  of  devotion.  I  lose  my- 
self in  memory  of  them  and  become  un- 
conscious of  whatever  else  is.  Active  will 
cannot  blow  through  my  love  and  clear  it 
of  misty  passion.  I  seek  to  make  it  until 
I  fall  exhausted,  and  then  the  tenderness 
[194] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

in  my  heart  warms  and  sparkles  and 
vitalises  in  the  pure  sunshine  of  love.  I 
am  its  slave,  bedewed  and  stumbling,  till 
I  gain  strength  to  repeat  the  drama,  or 
lead  the  will  for  the  time  a  puppet  pro- 
tagonist in  the  play. 

What  are  you  doing  this  dark,  rainy 
day  ?  I  fear  to  think  you  are  keeping  to 
your  room.  Do  not  house.  Take  exer- 
cise in  the  open  air  every  morning  and 
afternoon.  The  last  time  you  came  your 
appearance  disturbed  me.  It  was  so  for- 
lorn and  hopeless.  The  springs  of  your 
energy  and  buoyancy  and  health  seemed 
to  have  become  dry.  There  was  a  sickli- 
ness  over  your  face  and  in  your  spirit. 
But  I  was  happy  because  you  were  here. 
Still  you  looked  so  tired  and  full  of  care 
withal  that  my  heart  aches  for  you  yet. 
I  should  like  to  take  you  this  morning  as 
a  mother  takes  her  baby  on  her  lap,  and 
rubs  him  with  mild  water,  holding  up  soft 
linen  to  defend  the  tender  body  from 

stray  draughts.     She  washes  and  pats  the 
[195] 


A  WOMAN'S    HEART 

tender  skin,  brushes  up  the  brown  hair, 
and  lulls  him  to  restfulness.  Then 
finally  I  should  put  you  away  in  a  cool, 
shaded  cot,  like  the  baby,  for  a  sleep. 
With  such  care  the  sad  grey  shadows 
would  melt  from  the  face,  and  at  last  you 
would  repay  me  by  awakening  and  say- 
ing I  had  made  you  anew. 

I  fear  you  will  think  I  speak  too  freely. 
You  know  it  is  love  that  prompts,  and  it 
is  hard  to  keep  quiet  when  I  see  you  doing 
what  I  am  confident  is  harmful  to  you. 
You  do  so  much  that  is  harmful  to  the 
soul  about  which  I  am  forced  by  circum- 
stances to  keep  quiet.  May  I  not  protest 
about  the  body?  Think  of  your  long 
fasts  and  their  results  upon  your  health. 

"As  what  a  man  sees  so  have  his 
thoughts  been,"  sings  Arnold,  the  Mat- 
thew Arnold  you  say  you  cannot  under- 
stand because  you  are  really  so  little  in 
touch  with  the  thought  of  your  times. 
But  the  line  tells  the  truth  about  you. 
You  are  holy  and  sweet  and  honest  by 

nature.     Heaven   did  not  make  you   a 
[196] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

Catholic — you  are  too  free-spirited,  too 
manly  by  nature,  your  surroundings  have 
hemmed  you  into  such  a  faith.  You 
have  the  mental  inertness  of  Catholi- 
cism. This  is  a  great  reason  you  con- 
tinue in  your  present  life  instead  of  tak- 
ing hold  with  active  assertion  and  making 
your  life  what  you  say  you  wish  it.  The 
mental  indolence  of  Catholicism  has  had 
far-reaching  results  in  the  world's  his- 
tory. Compare  Protestant  Switzerland 
with  Catholic  Switzerland.  Look  at 
Spain — ignorant,  superstitious,  slothful, 
dirty,  priest-ridden  for  centuries.  The 
influences  of  Catholicism  are  truly  "anti- 
economic"  as  some  Irish  leaders  claim. 

Who  is  it  says,  "  The  loftiness  or  base- 
ness of  the  ethical  code  of  a  people  bears 
a  strict  relation  to  the  degree  of  their  in- 
tellectual enlightenment;  morality  being 
the  ethical  expression  or  equivalent  of  a 
nation's  mental  attainment"? 


[197] 


XXI. 

Were  you  the  earth,  dear  Love,  and  I  the  skies, 
My  love  should  shine  on  you  like  to  the  sun, 
And  look  upon  you  with  ten  thousand  eyes 
Till  heaven  wax'd  blind,  and  till  the  world  were  done. 

JOSUAH  SYLVESTER. 

I  CANNOT  help  sending  you  a  word  to-day, 
the  day  itself  is  so  fair  and  my  heart  is  so 
full  of  you.  Each  moment  this  morning, 
and  all  day  yesterday  and  the  day  before, 
I  have  been  thinking  of  you,  trying  to 
fancy  what  strange  incantations  you  were 
engaged  in,  and  what  genuflexions  at 
each  hour.  At  three  yesterday  I  sighted 
relief,  for  then  I  knew  where  you  would 
be  until  sleep  should  shut  remembrance 
out  of  my  soul.  But  there  I  am  wrong. 
Sleep  does  not  lose  memory  of  you.  I 
think  of  you,  and  dream  of  you,  and  love 

you  asleep  or  awake. 

[198] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

This  Easter-tide  has  a  great  signifi- 
cance, has  it  not?  To  you,  we  all  know 
what.  To  me  it  stands  for  all  revival, 
germination,  life  and  growth,  regenera- 
tion and  renewal  from  seemingly  dead 
seed.  Only  this  morning  I  was  thinking 
how  this  season  of  rejoicing  has  been 
kept  by  every  intelligent  people  known 
to  history.  Among  the  Greeks  there  were 
feasts  and  mysteries  at  their  springtide, 
and  the  Athenian  altars  decorated  with 
blossoms  from  Mount  Hymettus.  There 
were  their  processions  and  hymnals,  lam- 
entations for  dead  seed  in  the  ground  and 
pa3ans  for  its  springing  and  rising  to  the 
bright  clear  air  of  heaven. 

And  thinking  of  these  things  I  could 
see  how  the  stories  and  gossip  and  report 
of  the  simple-minded  peasantry,  among 
whom  Jesus  lived,  had  become  com- 
mingled with  the  old  legends  and  old 
faiths  and  customs  of  the  Greeks.  Then 
in  addition  there  were  Jewish  tradition 
and  usage.  I  think  that  after  the  church 

became   organized   it   was   a   matter  of 
[199] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

policy  to  adopt,  exaggerate,  and  personify 
in  Christian  forms  old  pagan  ideas  which 
lingered  among  the  people,  and  thus 
bring  the  multitude  within  its  fold  and 
command.  It  was  practically  expedient 
to  do  so,  and  practical  expedience  has 
always  been  the  rule  of  your  ecclesiastical 
organization.  In  this  way  it  gained  at 
first  what  it  has  lost  since. 

I  would  not  be  harsh  in  writing  this  to 
you — you  know  I  would  not.  But  I  listen 
to  your  exposition  of  what  you  believe, 
and  may  I  not  speak  too  ?  You  know  we 
live  in  times  when  the  other  doxy  has  a 
chance.  I  cannot  talk  it  to  you,  for  I 
should  feel  as  I  always  feel  when  I  am 
with  you — unable  to  set  forth  an  idea,  or 
argument,  able  only  to  suffer  with  you 
and  be  conscious  of  your  presence. 

May  I  send  you  this  bit  of  green?  It 
stands  for  a  lily.  It  means  hope  and 
wishes  to  typify  the  resurrection  of  that 
which  is  best  in  us  both. 

And  I  will  add  more.    I  could  no  more 

believe  that  Jesus  was  conceived  as  you 
[200] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

teach  him  to  have  been,  than  I  could 
believe  Athena  sprang  full-panoplied  from 
the  head  of  Zeus.  By  the  fiction  of  an 
unusual  double  nature  in  Jesus,  the 
human  and  distinctively  divine  nature- 
such  an  absurd,  and  trivial,  and  childish 
conception! — you  take  away  his  sweet 
humanity  and  nearness  to  ourselves.  If 
he  were  God  of  this  great  universe — God 
as  well  as  man — the  sacrifices  of  the  man 
were  nothing.  Ah,  we  have  all  of  us 
double  natures,  Jesus  and  each  one  of  us, 
and  with  some  of  us  deity  prevails,  and 
with  others  something  very  different  from 
deity. 

But  here,  in  this  Easter-tide,  I  have 
such  love  for  you,  my  sweet.  Oh,  to 
clasp  you,  to  hold  you  close,  to  feel  the 
sting  of  your  hand  as  it  touches  mine,  and 
your  breath  and  fragrant  hair,  to  see 
your  eyes — what  is  all  the  barren  dogma 
of  dyspeptic  theologues  to  this  ?  Dear 
heart,  this  of  mine  is  not  a  common  love. 
You  know  I  have  fought  and  striven 

against  it.    But  you  do  not  know  of  con- 
[201] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

flicts  with  great  waves  of  feeling  for  you 
when  I  used  to  walk  under  the  lindens 
night  after  night — when  I  first  knew  you. 
I  loved  you  then  because  I  could  not  do 
other.  And  I  love  you  now  beyond  every- 
thing else  in  life  because  I  am  utterly 
powerless  before  the  force  of  love  that  is 
in  me.  Resolutions  to  live  it  dow'n,  to 
live  over  it,  are  vain.  It  mounts  above 
every  feeling  and  every  thought  and 
dominates  them  all.  Like  a  great  ele- 
mental force  it  sweeps  everything  before 
it.  It  bows  to  nothing,  afl  things  sub- 
serve it,  and  it  is  lord  of  my  soul.  What 
can  I  do?  And  when  I  think  you  may 
desert  me,  what  swells  within  me?  A 
love  offended,  thrown  back,  wounded 
pride,  and  a  certain  fierce  vindictiveness 
— not  toward  you  but  toward  that  corpo- 
ration which  damns  in  its  God-insulting 
insolence  your  soul  and  life. 

When  you  have  said,  "  If  we  had  money 
we  should  be  married,"  you   meant  we 

are  separated  because  we  cannot  control 
[2021 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

vast  sums.  But  have  we  not  each  other, 
and  therefore  are  we  not  consciously  rich  ? 
Yea,  if  we  have  each  other. 

But  I  have  a  lover  who  is  yet  not  a 
lover.  That  is  sad — to  have  all  devotion 
and  passion  burning  in  one's  heart  and 
expressed  in  secret,  but  openly  coldness 
and  conventional  unknowledge.  What 
a  delight  it  would  be  to  say  to  my  friends 
that  I  love  you  and  will  cleave  to  you 
until  death. 

Dear  heart,  why  did  God  give  this  great 
love  to  me  if  it  was  not  to  be  satisfied  by 
having  you?  The  question  will  not  let 
me  rest — you  know  it  will  not.  How  it 
pushes  and  prods  and  hurts  day  and 
night!  This  morning,  for  instance,  when 
I  awoke,  it  was  three  hours  to  dawn, 
and  there  I  lay  building,  building  another 
plan  to  bring  the  wished-for  end.  When 
sleep  will  not  come  to  my  eyelids  that  is 
what  I  have  to  do.  And  what  better 
thing?  The  wish  for  you  is  strong. 

Now   in   those   early   hours   this   plan 

seemed  feasible.    Every  one  was  friendly 
[203] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

and  believed  our  desire  rational.  I  am 
not  certain  chat  they  would  not  in  an 
actual  state  of  affairs.  But  one's  per- 
spective may  be  awry  at  the  hours  I  did 
my  building.  You  shall  hear  of  it  again. 

Last  night  at  sundown  as  I  set  out  for 
a  walk,  I  said  to  myself,  "I  feel  as  if 
the  One  were  coming,  so  I  shall  not  go 
far,  only  round  Konon-wekah  pond  till  I 
can  see  the  top  of  Purple-knoll,  and  I 
shall  leave  word  that  I  am  back  at  once. 
Or  perhaps  it  is  a  letter  from  him."  I 
went  and  I  saw  the  magnificence  of  the 
setting  sun,  and  his  shining  upon  lovely 
waters.  And  when  I  got  back,  lo,  sun  of 
my  soul,  lay  the  dear  letter  from  you — 
you  know  which. 

What  a  wonder  the  sun  is,  is  he  not? 
His  going  out  of  the  day  is  the  greatest 
thing  about  it.  And  what  calmness! 
what  surety  and  majesty!  what  incom- 
prehensible magnificence!  I  doubt  if  in 
all  these  millions  of  years  he  has  been 
dropping  behind  this  earth,  if  ever  twice 

he  has  made  like  exits.    And  how  much 
[204] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

that  setting  of  his  has  had  to  do  with  such 
organizations  as  your  church.  Have  not 
men  "moved  west"  because  the  sun  set 
in  the  west?  Isn't  that  natural  phe- 
nomenon the  forerunner  of  "the  course  of 
empire?"  The  great  glowing  ball  sinks 
behind  distant  hills,  or  dark  waters,  and 
leaves  a  suggestion  in  the  mind  of  watch- 
ing humans  that  peace,  glorious  habita- 
tions, unalloyed  happiness,  are  beyond 
that  flood  of  gold.  Day  after  day  the  sun 
sinks,  and  many  are  his  brilliant  leave- 
takings.  Sleep  and  dreams  and  long 
night  hours  come  after.  And  the  watch- 
ing humans  remember,  and  think,  and 
dream,  and  begin  to  say  they  shall  see 
what  it  is  the  sun  seeks  with  such  display 
of  glory.  So  they  turn  westward.  If  the 
sun  rose  in  the  west  and  set  in  the  east, 
what  would  have  been  our  history? 
Whither  would  our  Aryan  fathers  have 
turned  those  thousands  of  years  ago? 
Would  Tokio  have  been  Athens,  and  San 
Francisco  Rome  ? 

This  is  not  pretty  paper  upon  which  to 
[205] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

write  to  you,  but  I  should  seek  in  vain 
for  any  fine  enough  and  rare  enough  to 
bring  you  the  love  and  embraces  and  as- 
surances I  send. 


[206] 


XXII. 

E'en  so  we  met;  and  after  long  pursuit, 
E'en  so  we  join'd;   we  both  became  entire; 

No  need  for  either  to  renew  a  suit, 

For  I  was  flax  and  he  was  flames  of  fire : 
Our  firm-united  souls  did  more  than  twine; 

So  I  my  Best-Beloved's  am;  so  He  is  mine. 

FRANCIS  QUARLES. 

THERE  is  nothing  to  write,  dearest,  but 
the  same  old  legend.  You  have  heard  it 
and  read  it  so  often  before  that  you  know 
it  by  heart.  Just  now  as  I  went  to  post  a 
note  there  rose  in  me  a  conviction  that 
you  might  expect  a  word  to-morrow— 
and  I  know  what  the  heart-sinking  is 
when  one  expects  and  does  not  get  the 
letter  of  letters. 

The  other  day  when  I  saw  you,  your 
nervous,  irritated  manner  told  me  more 
than  your  sentences.     It  hurts  me  when 
[207] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

I  remember — and  I  remember  most  of 
the  time — how  you  are  perplexed  and 
hunted  and  made  uneasy  by  assumption 
and  impertinent  commands  and  vindic- 
tiveness.  Naturally  such  things  exist  in 
your  little  world.  And  reinvigoration 
and  cleansing  and  destruction  of  its  false 
standards  will  never  come  from  the  priests 
themselves.  As  a  body  ecclesiasts  are  not 
noted  for  moral  courage.  The  priest 
prestige  gives  the  order  means  of  living 
at  ease,  and  a  place  of  authority  over 
their  human  kind.  Men  do  not  find 
fault  with  that  which  exalts  them  and 
assures  them  material  prosperity — wine 
instead  of  water  for  drink,  and  toasted 
pheasants  in  place  of  mutton  chop.  If 
they  see  vices  and  abuses  and  toadying  to 
factitious  rank  and  money,  it  is  in  accord 
with  the  reasoning  of  the  old  Latin  book 
of  logic  you  lent  me — to  let  abuses  and 
vices  be  that  good  may  come,  i.e.,  that 
the  church  may  go  on.  It  humiliates  me 
that  you  figure  in  such  scenes.  The  par- 
ticular flunkey  over  you  thinks  the  world 
[208] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

is  a  bal  masque  and  he  is  a  chief  of  the 
dancers.  I  groan  when  I  think  of  your 
anxious  face  and  the  pathetic  quiver 
about  the  dear  mouth. 

"Hold  things  in  their  proportion." 
"Many  things  that  men  deem  sins  are 
not  sins."  It  is  the  spirit,  dear  heart. 
The  ritual  is  nothing.  God  does  not  care 
for  that.  Mutterings  and  genuflexions 
and  passes  of  the  hand  signify  nothing. 
To  be  good  and  helpful,  as  you  are  at 
heart,  and  true  to  the  deep  nature  God 
gave  you — God  asks  this  of  you  and 
nothing  more. 

Take  it  off.  Smooth  it  out.  Lay  it 
away  in  a  drawer.  Lock  it  up  and  give 
me  the  key.  I  will  keep  it  to  the  end. 
Do  with  your  priestliness  as  you  do  with 
your  alb.  I  will  keep  the  key  so  fast  that 
you  shall  never  find  it. 

There  is  something  better  than  acqui- 
escence in  authority  and  belief  in  the  im- 
mutability and  inviolability  of  boyish  vows 
taken  in  ignorance  of  their  full  meaning. 

Would  you  take  the  decrees  of  a  legis- 
14  [209] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

lative  body  of  the  sixteenth  century  as 
competent  for  governing  a  state  of  the 
twentieth  century?  Would  you  take  the 
platform  of  a  convention  called  together 
to  nominate  a  head  officer  (even  if  that 
head  were  autocratic) — would  you  take 
them  to  be  infallible  ?  to  which  you  must 
unquestionably  submit?  But  that  is 
exactly  what  you  are  doing.  In  the 
church's  conventions,  or  councils,  there 
is  and  has  been  just  as  much  chicanery, 
just  as  much  wire-pulling,  just  as  much 
self-seeking,  as  in  so-called  secular  as- 
semblies. Yea,  and  a  thousand  times 
more.  Are  you  willing  to  be  a  puppet 
worked  by  a  wire  pulled  by  subtle  de- 
legates at  the  council  of  Trent?  God 
forbid! 

The  church  is  the  strongest  example 
that  the  world  knows,  as  I  have  said  be- 
fore, of  the  value  of  mere  assertion.  In 
the  face  of  knowledge  which  means  its 
ultimate  annihilation  it  stands  boldly  for- 
ward and  asserts  its  possession  of  the 
everlasting  secret  which  men  have  always 
[210] 


been  trying  to  guess.  And  although  there 
are  a  thousand  evidences  patent  to  the 
populace  that  its  assertions  are  most 
brazen,  still  it  maintains  its  power  over 
human  souls  by  its  strenuous  and  insist- 
ent assertion.  So  it  is  that  millions  of 
apparently  thinking  people  accept  it. 
In  the 'past  when  some  of  its  faithful  im- 
portunately dug  at  it  for  more  explicit 
evidences,  it  raised  and  spent  its  time 
concluding  upon  such  vital  questions  as 
whether  Adam  was  or  was  not  a  her- 
maphrodite— whether  the  world  were  cre- 
ated in  autumn,  in  spring  or  in  summer 
—where  the  pigeon  that  was  sent  forth 
from  the  ark  and  did  not  return  found 
its  mate.  And  yet  so  sodden  a  thing  can 
affect  your  life  and  mine! 

The  secret  marriage  ?  Yes,  if  you  can 
make  a  lasting  truce  with  your  conscience. 
Don't  forget  that  it  in  a  measure  degrades 
me.  It  will  induce  new  cares  and  fresh 
anxieties.  But  to  see  you  every  week, 
and  to  have  you  near  me  for  ever  so  short 
[211] 


moments!  How  we  should  look  forward 
to  those  hours  which  brought  you!  And 
how  happy  we  should  be  when  the  days 
came! 

It  would  be  easier  for  me  than  your 
leaving  the  church — now  easier.  A 
year  ago  we  might  have  borne  up  against 
the  publicity  and  calumny  and  excite- 
ment such  an  act  would  have  engendered. 
But  now! — these  months  of  agony  have 
been  too  exhausting.  I  doubt  if  you  could 
have  strength  in  such  a  tempest  not  to 
bend  before  the  storm.  Difficulties  we 
must  foresee.  And  the  inevitable  worri- 
ment  and  anxieties  of  life — misfortunes 
come  to  the  most  favoured  and  certainly 
we  should  not  be  among  the  most  favoured 
— all  trouble  would  suggest  to  you  the 
freedom  from  the  merely  living  cares  in 
which  a  priest's  life  is  passed.  You  re- 
member how  Vronsky  gave  up  his  past 
for  Anna  Karenina  and  the  memory  of 
his  sacrifices  came  up  and  poisoned  him. 
Hatred  for  the  one  for  whom  he  had  sac- 
rificed grew  in  his  heart,  and  in  some 
[212] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

strange  way  the  love  died.  Thus  would 
it  be  with  you  ?  Would  memories  of  your 
early  faith  and  days,  of  your  quietude  of 
soul  and  peace  of  heart  haunt  you  ? 
Would  questioning  thoughts  come  ? 
Would  you  ask  yourself  if  I  proved  all 
that  you  expected? — if  your  newer  life 
had  proved  all  that  you  had  passionately 
fancied?  Would  the  old  habits  and  cus- 
toms revive  ?  "It  had  much  to  commend 
it  after  all,"  you  would  say  to  yourself  of 
the  priest's  loneliness  and  circumscribed 
freedom,  and  independence  in  the  con- 
trol of  his  immediate  affairs,  forgetful  of 
the  once  overweening  passion  you  had  to 
possess  me.  Every  good  point  of  youjr 
old  life  would  come  to  you  exaggerated. 
Weariness  with  the  new  conditions  would 
gradually  creep  in.  Then  discord.  Then 
an  unquenchable  longing  for  the  associa- 
tions and  faiths  of  your  youth  would 
grow  within  you.  Your  love  would  be 
dead.  And  I  ? — I  should  stand  a  de- 
spairing shadow  and  your  going  would 

be  my  death. 

[213] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

But  again  the  secret  marriage  ?  No, 
dear  heart,  you  must  not  lead  a  double 
life.  Neither  one  of  us  must  think  of  liv- 
ing a  lie.  In  any  concealment  we  should 
be  most  unhappy.  You  must  force  your- 
self to  live  up  to  your  professions.  Tell 
me,  by  your  casuistry  should  I  advise 
you  to  follow  a  course  of  action  which  I 
do  not  believe  right  for  any  one  to  follow, 
but  which  I  know  you  think  right  ? 

When  I  sicken  with  the  struggle  here  I 
wish  we  were  far  away  on  the  western 
plains,  quite  alone  together  if  need  be, 
where  we  could  work  our  sustenance  from 
the  soil,  and  be  beyond  the  daily  sight  and 
pressure  of  the  starving,  jostling  masses. 
To  take  even  one's  daily  food  seems  like 
taking  sustenance  from  their  poor  bodies. 
Or  if  we  could  be  near  some  military 
post,  where  you  could  labour  among  the 
soldiery — far  away  in  that  wild,  free  air. 
Think  of  the  blessedness  of  it.  If  things 
vexed,  if  persons  were  rude — whatever 
disturbed — I  should  think  that  you  loved 
me  and  I  you,  and  we  were  together,  and 
[214] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

all  trouble  would  dissolve   in   glow  and 
warmth  and  happiness. 

But  what  shall  I  have  done,  dear  love, 
under  your  promises  and  the  secret  mar- 
riage? Left  all  traditions  and  followed 
you  with  the  faith  in  my  heart  that  you 
are  true.  My  rooms  here  are  ample.  I 
have  looked  about  a  hundred  times  and 
thought  how  they  would  do  for  two. 
And  provided  the  second  could  come  with 
clear  conscience  that  his  coming  was  right 
in  the  sight  of  the  great  God  of  the  uni- 
verse— not  the  puny,  manlike  God  of 
popular  definition,  but  the  infinite  moral 
force  of  all  ages  and  all  peoples  and  all 
religions  and  all  worlds,  even  the  remot- 
est shining  star  of  a  sun — if  the  second 
comer  could  come  to  these  rooms  con- 
vinced that  it  were  right  for  him  to  be 
with  the  one  he  loved,  I  am  sure  no  pal- 
ace in  all  the  world  could  hold  greater 
happiness.  To  be  with  you  night  and 
day!  But  it  must  not  be  unless  you  see 
God  and  man  and  life  and  its  duties 

through  larger  lenses. 
[215] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

And  yet  to  live  with  you  as  other 
women  live  with  their  husbands,  to  be 
loved  and  trusted  by  you — that  is  the 
only  future.  I  will  give  myself  wholly  to 
you,  if  you  wish.  It  will  not  be  sacrifice 
in  the  light  of  love,  for  love  knows  no  sac- 
rifice. Yes,  it  shall  be  the  secret  mar- 
riage which  you  say  is  the  only  way.  But 
let  us  not  forget  that  that  which  you  have 
always  stickled  to  exalt  and  mystify  to  my 
eyes — the  trick  is  so  much  a  part  of  your 
education,  dear,  that  you  could  not  help 
it — from  that  moment  your  ecclesias- 
ticism  will  be  abased.  All  that  has  been 
said  about  secret  immoralities  of  priests 
may  by  venomous  tongues  be  said  about 
you.  That  would  be  terrible — about  you. 
You  make  your  church,  you  see,  a  whited 
sepulchre. 

I  can  control  my  own  feelings,  but  I 
cannot  master  my  sympathies  for  yours. 
For  your  dear  self  I  would  make  any  sac- 
rifice. That  is  my  gratification — to  sacri- 
fice myself  to  you.  That  is  our  secret 

marriage.    To  me  it  has  joys.    But  oh,  its 
[216]    ' 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

humiliation  and  pain — its  awful  unright- 
ness.  It  is  for  your  sake  I  am  glad,  not 
my  own.  It  will  be  marriage  without  the 
honour  of  marriage,  with  few  of  its  mys- 
teries, and  none  of  the  sweet  delights  of 
the  constant  presence  of  the  loved.  Tell 
me,  was  there  ever  another  couple  who 
had  yearned  for  each  other,  and  grown 
thin  and  white  and  sleepless  with  long- 
ing, before  they  had  the  supreme  kiss  of 
married  love  ? 

You  know  how  I  have  told  you  that 
when  I  see  wives  and  mothers  with  their 
blossoming  babies,  I  feel  jealous  and  hard, 
and  say  to  myself,  "Why  can  I  not  be 
like  these  women  and  have  what  they  have 
to  fill  my  heart — a  husband  and  chil- 
dren ?"  My  vain  shadows!  Dear  souls, 
my  hand  trembles  as  I  write  their  name. 
Our  dear,  empty  shadows! 

It  was  only  this  morning  that  a  pain 
came  in  my  heart — a  pain  as  of  empti- 
ness and  hunger.  "It  aches  for  his 
kiss,"  I  said,  "a  kiss  which  calls  it  to 

send  blood  rushing  to  the  very  skin  in  its 
[217] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

leap  to  meet  his  lips."  Dear  heart,  my 
whole  soul  goes  out  to  you  and  my  whole 
body  longs  with  a  great  desire  for  your 
touch  and  tenderness.  The  brain  and 
heart  nature  gave  me  can  never  do  their 
appointed  work  in  life  apart  from  your 
brain  and  heart.  The  best  that  is  in  me 
rises  and  thrives  in  your  presence  and  my 
whole  weak  self  is  alive  to  the  nearness, 
the  beauty,  and  the  strong,  sweet  grace  of 
you. 

We  love  each  other  and  have  passed 
through  furnace  for  that  love.  It  is  im- 
possible that  we  be  not  married.  Not  to 
marry  is  to  strike  with  an  incalculable 
disease  the  lives  of  both.  It  is  sin  not  to 
follow  the  dictates  of  our  better  nature. 
It  is  not  passion,  but  the  imperious  de- 
mands of  our  higher  nature  struggling  for 
development.  We  must  be  together— 
either  observing  conventionalism  and  the 
voice  of  the  world — if  so  it  will  permit — 
or  scorning  and  at  war  with  it.  You  say 
you  cannot  live  without  me.  Love  for 

you  consumes  my  days  and  burns  away 

[218] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

my  nights.  To  be  with  you  for  even  a 
short  time  each  week — to  watch  you 
breathe  and  speak,  to  note  the  changing 
light  in  your  face,  to  see  your  ready  strong 
grasp  and  the  turn  of  your  educated 
hand — these  shall  be  my  compensations 
for  what  that  God-and-man-offending 
corporation  which  controls  you  otherwise 
denies. 

It  shall  be  as  you  propose — we  shall  go 
to  Hartington  and  be  married,  and  then 
go  on  living  as  heretofore — with  the  ex- 
ception of  your  weekly  visits.  You  break 
no  vows.  You  are  true  to  me.  A  mar- 
ried man  true  to  his  wife  is  chaste.  I 
shall  say  to  my  friends — if  need  should 
come — that  I  am  married  secretly  and  I 
cannot  tell  more.  We  shall  be  "  one  soul 
in  two  bodies,"  which  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  terms  a  "most  mystical  union." 


[219] 


XXIII. 

Yea,  with  thy  sweet  lips,  with  thy  sweet  sword;  yea, 
Take  life  and  all,  for  I  will  die,  I  say; 

Love,  I  gave  love,  is  life  a  better  boon  ? 
For  sweet  night's  sake  I  will  not  live  till  day; 

Ah  God,  ah  God,  that  day  should  be  so  soon! 

A.  C.  SWINBURNE. 

DEAR  heart,  I  caine  home  quite  safely 
last  night.  You  had  put  my  soul  in  such 
a  singing  mood  that  the  way  was  short. 
Noise,  crowd,  and  staring  lights  made  no 
difference.  I  was  back  with  you  in  the 
quaint  little  dwelling,  looking  into  your 
face  and  feeling  the  delight  of  your  hands 
and  breath.  And  every  moment  since  I 
have  avoided  the  people,  endeavouring 
not  to  have  converse,  in  order  to  keep 
your  sweet  presence  and  touch  and  voice 
near  me.  It  is  as  with  one  who  is  cold 

and  suffering  in  some  frozen  place  and 

[220] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

he  dwells  with  rapture  on  the  soft  airs  of 
summer,  and  the  sunlight  and  warmth 
and  the  dew  and  birds.  So  it  is  with  me. 
I  think  of  you.  You  are  summer. 

God  keep  and  bless  you  for  the  sweet 
letter  you  wrote  me  on  your  getting  home 
—no — on  your  getting  back— "home"  is 
where  you  and  I  are  together.  The  little 
kisses  *  *  *  those  and  the  "Yours. ever" 
at  the  end.  How  dear  they  are  and  how 
they  help  fill  the  longing  emptiness  of  my 
heart.  How  innocent,  too,  don't  you 
see  ?  how  innocent ! 

And  how  happy  we  were  down  there  in 
the  little  house,  and  you  said  they  were 
beautiful  hours,  and  you  loved  me  better 
if  that  were  possible.  How  my  heart 
knocked  at  my  ribs  when  we  parted.  No 
sacrifice — even  our  secret  marriage — 
seemed  great  in  that  flood  of  love  in  which 
we  were  submerged.  How  I  loved  you 
as  you  stood  there  with  shining  eyes! 
"Oh,  God,  what  would  I  not  do  for 
him!  "I  thought. 

Because  I  know  doubts  are  combating 
[221] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

you,  I  say  that  if  Jesus  were  alive  and 
here  to-day,  and  saw  how  we  loved— -you 
and  I — and  knew  what  you  had  said  and 
done  in  love  for  me,  he  would  tell  you 
"Heed  not  the  letter  but  the  spirit  of  the 
law  of  mercy  and  love.  What  avail  genu- 
flexions and  incense,  the  sacrifices  of 
mass  and  prayers,  lauds  and  matins  and 
all  forms,  when  the  soul  which  they  en- 
crust and  sometimes  smother  is  not 
there?  Take  thought  of  thy  soul's  hon- 
esty. Observance  of  all  the  incantations 
prescribed  by  all  councils  and  synods  will 
make  thee  no  whit  better  unless  thy  soul 
holds  its  eyes  in  the  eternal  principle  of 
human  love,  human  right,  and  its  own 
manliness.  Remember  the  letter  killeth 
the  spirit,  and  ceremonials  and  scarlet 
mantles  are  often  a  husk  which  conceals 
the  mummification  of  spirit  and  of  feel- 
ing." 

Love  of  my  soul,  will  you  not  send  me 
some  word  ?    Are  you  well  ?    I  think  how 

you  looked  in  our  hurried  interview  and 

[222] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

I  fear  for  you.  And  the  poor  little  sen- 
tence in  your  note,  "My  peace  of  mind 
and  heart  are  gone,"  is  with  me  all  the 
time.  At  one  moment  I  am  angry,  at 
another  I  am  melted  with  tenderness  and 
compassion,  and  cry  in  my  heart,  "The 
dear  love,  how  blind  are  his  eyes  in  all  his 
gropings  for  the  right!" 

To  love  and  to  trust  are  different.  One 
can  trust  and  not  love.  Again  one  can 
love  and  not  trust,  I  know,  in  these  sad 
days.  I  love  you,  joy  of  my  soul,  but  oh, 
I  cannot  trust  you,  for  to-morrow,  I  see 
plainly,  at  the  bidding  of  some  long- 
agone,  self-seeking,  ecclesiastical  politi- 
cian, now  a  mere  handful  of  evil  dust, 
you  may  thrust  a  rapier  to  my  very  heart. 

You  whom  I  love  so  tenderly,  you  will 
not  drive  me  beyond  the  verge  of  sanity 
by  such  inexplicable  conduct.  Oh,  you 
do  not  know  how  it  oppresses  me.  You 
pledged  yourself  to  write  and  you  do  not. 
My  heart  misgives  me.  Are  you  ill  ?  Or 

what  awful  thing  has  come  upon  you  ? 
[223] 


A  WOMAN'S    HEART 

If  you  could  for  one  moment  suffer  the 
choking  agony  that  is  with  me  day  and 
night  because  I  do  not  hear  from  you, 
and  because  I  am,  now  with  our  mar- 
riage, inextricably  bound  up  in  your 
being — if  you  could  for  one  moment 
understand,  you  would  pity  me  and  come, 
or  send  some  word. 

You  cannot  tell  another  man,  dearest, 
of  our  love,  of  my  devotion  to  you,  and 
your  sweet  passion  for  me.  Long  you 
have  put  the  unrighteous  act  from  you. 
You  cannot  tell  the  dreadful  confessor 
of  how  you  clasped  me  in  your  arms,  how 
you  have  kissed  me  thousands  of  times. 
You  cannot  tell  him,  dear  love.  It  would 
be  dishonourable,  unmanly.  It  is  de- 
faming me.  It  is  treating  sacrilegiously 
and  defaming  that  which  is  most  holy  to 
the  one  who  loves  you  and  whom  you 
love.  You  cannot,  my  beautiful.  It  is 
impossible. 

Oh,  I  was  a  fool,  a  hundred  times  a 

fool.     Why  did  I  not  know  that  if  you 

[224] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

were  false  to  your  promises  to  the  church, 
you  would  be  false  to  your  pledges  to  me  ? 
It  is  easy  enough  reasoning  now — is  it 
not? — but  it  has  come  too  late.  Pro- 
testing the  profoundest  love  and  giving 
it  expression  by  acts  and  vows  of  eternal 
fidelity,  and  then  at  a  whim,  a  caprice, 
the  behest  of  an  "office"  or  a  "retreat,'* 
tossing  declaration  and  memory  of  every 
consecrating  act  aside!  Is  not  a  savage, 
roasting  his  writhing  victim  at  a  slow 
fire,  tender  and  gentle-hearted  compared 

with  such  action  ? 

• 

Deep  down  within  me  there  is  always 
such  a  glowing  strength  and  love  for  you. 
Disloyalty  alone  could  make  it  bubble 
into  madness — when  your  soul  and  face 
is  like  the  sea  and  takes  on  the  mood  of 
the  sky  above  it. 

I  take  you  by  the  hand  in  spirit,  dear, 
and  I  ask  you  this :  "You  are  sent  out  and 
published  as  a  teacher  of  the  people. 
Now  if  all  men  had  your  bad  faith,  what 
then  of  the  affairs  of  the  world  ?  Would 

15  [225] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

they  go  on  ?  All  things  in  which  men  have 
to  rely  on  another's  word,  yea,  contract 
in  writing  like  our  marriage  contract — 
corporations,  exchange,  trade,  barter — 
what  of  them  ?  Would  they  go  on  if  held 
to  by  promises  as  false  as  now  you 
assert  were  yours  to  me?  We  should 
lapse  into  savagery  with  such  lily-livered 
vows." 

Your  powers  claim  that  when  the 
bishop  ordained  you  there  was  a  certain 
inpouring  of  the  Holy  Ghost.  If  this 
were  true  should  you  not  be  a  stronger 
man  spiritually  than  others?  But  are 
you  better  in  right- doing  than  other  men  ? 
Are  you  more  true  to  obey  the  moral 
law  and  the  natural  law  of  God  ? — more 
tender  to  those  who  love  you  and  whom 
you  love  ? — more  faithful  to  promises  and 
pledges  involving  the  greatest  things  in 
human  life  ? 

Your  secret  is  safe.    I  shall  not  tell  of 
our  secret  marriage.     Your  church  will 
prescribe  your  penance — when  you  con- 
fess.    What  happens  to  me  the  church 
[226] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

does  not  take  account  of.  In  the  law  of 
this  republic  my  ancestors  helped  to  make 
and  govern — where  your  foreign  church 
is  now  installing  itself  as  a  power — you 
are  my  husband,  I  am  your  wife.  "But," 
says  your  church  to  me,  "he  is  not  your 
husband,  for  I  have  forbidden  him  to 
marry.  You  may  be  his  paramour.  You 
cannot  be  his  decent  wife." 

How  can  I  turn  ? — whither  ? — a  woman 

—  a  heart-broken  woman — a  woman 
without  fortune.  Did  your  church  ever 
yet  take  account  of  a  woman  without  for- 
tune? while  she  was  still  on  earth?  In 
its  arrogance  and  ecclesiastical  pride  is  a 
woman — even  if  she  proves  a  Joan  of  Arc 

—more  than  a  grain  of  sand  to  be  swept 
aside  ?  Look  at  the  faces  and  bearings  of 
your  priests  when  they  talk  with  all 
women,  save  the  excessively  rich,  and 
you  will  tell  me  my  claim  on  you  is 
naught. 

Oh,  I  shall  say  to  men,  "Deny  it  all 
privilege.     Deny  it  all  power.     It  is  so 
unpitying  to  those  it  has  in  its  grasp.    It 
[227] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

is  a  great  mediaeval,  spiritual  prison — 
with  all  the  inhumanities  of  the  old 
mediaeval  prisons  of  stone — where  count- 
less souls  are  perishing  in  secret  dun- 
geons which  the  hurrying  world  does  not 
see  and  cannot  understand — and  these 
poor  prisoners  are  deprived  of  true  sun- 
shine and  of  God." 


[228] 


XXIV. 

But  had  I  wist,  before  I  kist, 

That  love  had  been  sae  ill  to  win; 
I  had  lockt  my  heart  in  a  case  of  gowd 

And  pinn'd  it  with  a  siller  pin. 
And,  O!  if  my  young  babe  were  born, 

And  set  upon  the  nurse's  knee, 
And  I  mysell  were  dead  and  gane, 

And  the  green-grass  growing  over  me ! 

ANON. 

JUST  now  as  I  took  up  a  railway  map 
and  traced  my  journey  beginning  to-night 
to  your  city,  all  the  blood  in  my  body 
beat  and  sang,  striking  to  my  very  finger 
tips.  My  heart  warmed  and  quickened 
as  I  saw  in  a  flash  the  whole  stretch  of 
meadow  land  and  wooded  hill,  and  you 
at  the  end.  I  thought  of  your  gilded 
dome,  and  the  silvery  grey  of  the  house 
roofs  as  they  would  shine  forth  in  the 

morning    light.      It    was    like    the    first 
[229] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

warmth  and  gentleness  and  dazzling 
brilliancy  of  spring.  It  tells  me  that  all 
is  not  passed  yet,  and  that  you  may  be 
saved.  "It  is  possible,"  I  cannot  help 
saying,  "it  is  possible."  You  are  the 
supreme  fact  of  life.  All  else  is  inanity. 
I  am  coming,  love,  I  am  coming. 

Tell  your  confessor,  dearest,  that,  after 
many  months  of  vacillation  and  even  your 
final  decision  against  it,  you  come  to  him 
because  you  thought  it  right.  Tell  him 
that  to  me  the  suggestion  of  your  going 
was  unutterably  revolting — impure,  un- 
chaste, a  degradation  and  denial  of  the 
dignity  and  beauty  of  your  manhood. 
But  when  I  knew  you  deemed  it  right, 
and  wished  to  come  to  peace  with  your 
forms,  I  urged  you. 

And  will  you  tell  him,  too,  that  a 
woman  never  loved  a  man  more  than  I 
love  you.  Oh,  soul  of  my  soul,  I  have 
loved  you,  and  I  have  lost  you.  And  I 
love  you  yet  in  spite  of  this  betrayal  of 

me  which  I  know  you  are  to  make. 

[230] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

There  is  certainly  mind  in,  or  behind 
— the  originating  cause  of — everything. 
For  does  not  everything  teach  us  if  we 
will  learn?  The  smallest  berry,  the 
commonest  weed,  the  triflingest  fragment 
of  inorganic  matter  tells  us  a  story,  a 
history,  of  a  guiding  force  behind  it,  if  we 
will  look  and  listen. 

"The  minutest  atom  comprehends 
A  world  of  loves  and  hatreds." 

Your  God  seems  to  me  gross  and  ma- 
terial and  limited  by  the  personality  and 
anthropomorphic  qualities  with  which  you 
endow  him.  The  very  nearness  and  hu- 
manness  which  you  feel  are  beauties, 
which  call  you  most  frequently  to  the 
so-called  divine  presence,  are  to  me  re- 
volting. I  cannot  come  so  near  Infinity. 
It  would  not  be  to  me  the  Absolute  if  it 
could  assume  any  form  or  any  peculiar 
presence. 

And  yet  I  hold  mankind  better  and 
greater  than  you  dogmatise.  For  to  me 

we  are  the  greatest  flower  of  the  unfold- 
[231] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

ing  of  Absolute  Life — on  this  small  planet 
of  ours  an  evolution  going  on  now  these 
many  millions  of  years.  Whither  this 
Life  will  lead,  or  what  purpose  it  has,  I 
know  not.  That  is  my  faith — I  do  not 
ask.  Is  it  not  greater  than  childish  de- 
mands for  trivial  signs  and  portents  and 
material  comfortings — the  "presence  of 
God"— oh,  you  of  little  faith? 

I  cannot  lay  aside  the  old  Greek  and 
nineteenth  century  Hegelian  notion  that 
the  human  soul  is  a  beautiful  energy 
pushing  its  way  through  the  world,  sub- 
ject to  cosmical  laws  of  morality — the 
great  Laws  of  which  Sophocles  sings— 
and  most  perfectly  and  best  fulfilling  its 
mission  in  overcoming  difficulties  and 
acting  out  its  creative  will.  This  is  not 
your  view — it  is  antipodal  to  what  your 
church  teaches.  But  the  Greeks  were 
right. 

The  farther  wisdom  and  science  carry 
us,  the  more  remote  and  the  more  im- 
personal seems  the  first  great  cause. 

Wherever  such  a  faith  as  yours  has  been 

[232] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

received  and  adopted  as  a  formal  relig- 
ion— society  being  cultivated  and  intel- 
lectual— a  genuine  scepticism  and  con- 
tempt for  religion  have  followed.  The 
history  of  France  is  an  instance. 

"Our  love  is  principle,  and  has  its  root 
In  reason,  is  judicious,  manly,  free; 
Yours,  a  blind  instinct,  crouches  to  the  rod, 
And  licks  the  foot  that  treads  it  in  the  dust." 

Cowper  is  right.  The  puerile  optimism, 
the  childish  denial  of  realities,  the  theory 
that  whatever  is  is  right,  which  I  have 
heard  preached  from  your  pulpits,  leads 
priests  and  prelates  to  unspeakable  things 
— to  toadying  to  people  possessing  money 
and  power,  to  teaching  those  living  in 
most  noisome  surroundings,  deadly  alike 
to  morals  and  physical  health,  that  it  is 
"God's  will"  and  they  must  submit. 

Dear  heart,  you  did  not  ask  me  to 
write  to  you,  but  all  this  most  miserable 
day  I  have  been  remembering  what  you 
said  in  your  last  dear  letter — that  a  word 
from  me  was  strength  and  consolation  to 
[233] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

you — and  I  am  taking  the  courage  to 
send  you  this.  If  it  is  not  pleasing  to  you 
to  have  it,  I  will  not  trouble  you  again. 

I  cannot  see  that  my  decision  of  a 
week  ago,  and  yours  of  yesterday,  were 
not  right.  They  were.  But  it  is  killing 
me  to  believe  it.  All  night  long  I  watch 
the  stars  turning  in  infinity  and  think  of 
the  past  and  our  unforetellable  future. 

I  say  our  decisions  were  right  for  us  as 
things  unhappily  are,  not  as  they  more 
happily  should  be.  It  is  not  faith  you 
have,  dear,  but  fear.  You  fear  the  lying 
tongues  of  your  people.  You  fear  there 
may  be  some  force  in  the  incantations  in 
which  you  have  been  bred  and  have 
preached  to  others.  You  fear  to  change 
your  social  status.  You  are  a  conserva- 
tive by  training  and  like  best  to  abide  by 
things  as  they  are,  even  if  they  are  not 
what  you  would  have.  I  do  not  wish  to 
anger  you,  dear  love,  but  is  not  all  this 
true?  I  have  tried  not  to  believe  it.  I 
would  not  have  you  change,  for  you  are 

inexpressibly  beautiful  and  dear  as  you 

[234] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

are — but  ah,  if  you  were  a  trifle  more 
daring  and  a  trifle  more  rational!  Yon- 
der pomposity  could  not  then  make  you 
quiver  as  he  lately  did.  God  never  meant 
such  dominion — based  wholly  on  fac- 
titiousness — or  such  subserviency  to  be 
in  any  of  his  creatures. 

Dear  heart,  do  not  blame  me  for  say- 
ing this.  I  think  it.  You  have  forced  me 
to  think  it.  But  do  not  fear  that  I  am 
crying  out  at  our  too  late  decision.  I  am 
not.  I  have  bought  it  too  dearly.  I  give  up 
the  last  and  best  I  had.  There  is  nothing 
more  to  give,  or  lose,  or  in  renunciation 
to  suffer.  It  seems  hardly  possible  I 
should  live — that  human  flesh  can  endure 
after  weeks  of  such  agony. 

Would  it  be  too  much  if  I  ask  you  to 
send  a  little  letter  so  that  I  may  get  it  on 
my  birthday?  Thursday,  you  know,  is 
that  luckless  day.  Life  is  nothing  but 
endurance.  And  one  reason  I  want  you 
to  send  me  the  letters  I  have  written  you 
is  this: — if  ever  in  the  future — supposing 
I  have  a  future — I  am  inclined  to  act  even 
[235] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

in  any  small  way  upon  the  seeming  sin- 
cerity, courage,  honesty,  true-hearted- 
ness  of  us  mortals,  I  want  the  letters  to  go 
to  and  read  over.  They  will,  I  fancy, 
tell  me  how  I  once  believed  one  to  be 
inalienably  true  and  honourable  and  sin- 
cere and  courageous — believed  as  much 
as  in  the  existence  of  my  own  soul.  You 
see  I  cannot  shut  my  eyes  to  facts.  Oh, 
I  am  ill,  dear  love,  and  perhaps  I  have 
written  wildly.  Forgive  me  if  I  have. 

But  I  have  always  written  what  to  me 
seemed  true — nothing  but  the  truth.  Re- 
member every  act,  and  every  word,  and 
you  will  see  that  I  have.  I  hope  God 
will  give  you  strength  to  live  bravely.  If 
anything  happens  to  you,  my  precious 
one — if  you  are  again  attacked  upon  any 
side — write  or  come  to  me. 


[236] 


XXV. 

Some  love  too  little,  some  too  long, 

Some  sell,  and  others  buy; 
Some  do  the  deed  with  many  tears, 

And  some  without  a  sigh; 
For  each  man  kills  the  thing  he  loves, 

Yet  each  man  does  not  die. 

OSCAR  WILDE. 

WHEN  I  awoke  this  morning  it  was  with 
the  conviction  that  you  misunderstood  me 
yesterday.  You  have  misunderstood  me 
in  so  much  that  I  beg  you  not  in  this  to 
see  falsely.  I  endeavoured  to  show  you— 
and  through  long  years — how  I  thought 
it  right  and  just  according  to  the  great 
laws  of  God  for  you  to  act.  To  have 
acted  on  the  lines  we  discussed  would 
have  been  noblest  and  highest  in  con- 
duct. But  it  would  have  been  in  contra- 
vention of  established  precedent  and  at 
[237] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

variance  with  conventional    conformity. 
You  would  not. 

"  Now,"  I  said  to  myself,  "  he  would  not 
accept  my  point  of  view,  my  rules,  my 
laws;  he  feels  that  they  are  wrong.  Then 
he  must  accept  his  own.  There  is  no 
middle  course.  It  must  be  either  mine  or 
his,  or  he  and  I  are  both  doing  wrong.  I 
must  try  to  help  him  to  his  own  again. 
And  once  having  obtained  his  own, 
I  will  help  him  to  keep  it  always.  That 
is  the  only  good  I  can  do  for  him,  and  it 
is  the  remaining  sacrifice  I  can  make  for 
him.  The  agony  of  his  reconciliation 
with  old  forms  is  in  time  over.  He  will 
not  know  the  process  is  a  cauterizing  of 
my  soul.  But  if  he  is  happier,  perhaps  I 
shall  be.  If  he  is  miserable,  I  know  that 
I  am.  And  perhaps  if  he  becomes  hap- 
pier it  may  mean  happiness  for  both  of  us. 
But  whether  it  means  happiness  or  mis- 
ery for  us  all  our  lives,  he  must  do  as  he 
thinks  right,  and  I  must  constrain  him 
and  help  him  to  do  as  he  thinks  right. 

And  if  I  cannot — because  he  does  not 

[238] 


A    WOMAN'S   HEART 

accept  them — follow  what  I  think  are 
God's  greatest  and  sternest  and  most 
loving  commands,  then  I  can  at  least  go 
on  calmly  and  patiently,  and  in  the  end, 
perhaps,  the  pain  of  it  will  be  my  justi- 
fication." 

In  this  way  I  have  spoken  with  myself, 
dearest.  Is  it  not  right  ?  I  cannot  see  it 
is  not.  The  reasoning  and  morals  are 
true  throughout.  If  I  am  wrong  in  any 
point,  tell  me. 

This  is  a  cool,  wet  day,  and  while  you 
are  going  about  in  the  chill,  Glyky  and  I 
are  the  only  souls  here.  Everybody  is 
away.  Glyky  wags  his  tail  and  looks  up 
knowingly  when  I  ask  him  where  you 
are.  And  so  we  sit,  longing  for  the  sight 
of  your  dear  face,  and  the  touch  of  your 
dear  hand.  So  we  shall  long  through  all 
the  days  that  are  to  come 

Your  letter  is  just  here,  my  own,  your 
letter  of  Sunday  and  Monday  nights,  and 
reading  and  re-reading  it  with   uncon- 
querable pain  of  heart,  I  know  not  what 
[239] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

to  answer.  You  accept  what  I  say  is 
right  for  you  to  do.  But  do  not  yet,  dear 
heart.  Not  yet.  I  cannot  bear  it  yet — 
unless  it  is  essential  to  you.  Not  this 
week,  please.  Let  me  see  you  once  more. 

It  is  not  true  what  you  say— "if  you 
had  lived  in  strict  accordance  with  your 
own  faith  you  would  be  a  better  man," 
"being  what  you  are  it  was  wrong  for  you 
to  give  expression  to  love  and  take  on 
other  vows."  But  are  you  not  better  and 
nobler  for  such  expression  ?  That  which 
makes  you  better  and  nobler  cannot  be 
wrong.  Arguments  from  my  point  of 
view  do  creep  in,  you  see,  and  enlarge  our 
consideration  of  your  action. 

You  say  that  when  we  have  spoken  of 
our  duty  "you  could  not  bring  yourself 
to  speak  and  cut  away  all  hope,  doubt- 
ful as  it  was."  My  precious  one,  is  there 
any  hope?  I  have  tried  to  accept  what 
you  told  me  that  awful  day  as  ultimate. 
But  your  sentence  is  the  spar  thrown  to 
the  one  sinking  the  last  time. 

And  you  say  that  if  you  should  follow 

[240] 


A  WOMAN'S   HEART 

what  I  believe  is  the  only  necessary  faith, 
you  know  and  feel  that  you  would  be  a 
better  and  nobler  man  than  you  are. 
Can  you  not,  dearest  heart,  with  me  al- 
ways at  your  side  to  help  you,  oh,  so  ten- 
derly, along  the  new  path  ?  My  head 
whirls  with  the  old  intoxication  at  the 
thought. 

All  we  have  to  believe,  dear,  is  that  this 
world,  this  life,  is  an  inexplicable,  vast 
mystery — Absolute  Life — God — working 
through  moral  laws,  for  which  there  is 
no  word  mighty  enough,  no  word  beauti- 
ful enough,  and  natural  laws — God  un- 
folding in  an  inexplicable  way.  We  can- 
not know  more,  nor  believe  more.  (To 
pretend  to  know  more  is  lies  and  hypoc- 
risy and  fetichism).  Whither  this  Life 
tends  we  do  not  know.  Nor  can  we  con- 
ceive how  we  sprang  into  being — the  be- 
ginning of  humanity.  We  are  here,  and 
there  is  naught  for  us  to  do  but  accept 
our  condition,  be  helpful  and  tender  to 
one  another,  and  go  on  to  the  end.  It 

must  be  right,  dearest,  and  the  greatest 
16  [241] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

faith,  the  greatest  love  and  confidence  in 
the  Absolute  is  to  go  forward  without  a 
question,  to  do  what  we  can  simply  and 
in  accord  with  moral  and  natural  law, 
and  await  the  unfolding  of  the  mystery 
beyond  the  stars. 

I  have  written  hurriedly  for  I  could  not 
let  the  morning  pass  without  a  word  to 
you,  my  sweet,  dear  heart.  You  are  not 
mean  and  ignoble,  but  you  are  my  dar- 
ling always.  It  is  because  you  have  so 
noble  and  sweet  and  human  a  nature  that 
I  love  you.  And  I  see,  oh,  so  clearly,  the 
pains  and  limitations  of  your  life,  through 
its  ecclesiasticism. 

Oh,  I  love  you,  and  so  inextinguish- 
ably! It  is  my  life  and  existence — the 
love.  You  do  not  know  the  heartache 
that  is  in  every  day  because  I  love  you, 
and  you  are  far  away.  If  you  were  here 
I  might  tire  you  with  ceaseless  iteration 
of  love  you,  love  you — all  the  time  my 
heart  crying  for  joy  at  your  presence.  I 
struggle  to  lay  aside  all  bodily  and  com- 
mon yearnings  for  you.  I  cannot.  When 
[242] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

I  force  them  off  for  a  few  hours  they 
come  back  upon  me  with  terrible  might 
and  I  ache  to  be  near  you,  to  touch  your 
hair  or  cheek,  to  throw  my  arms  round 
you  and  clasp  you  as  a  defence  from  those 
woes  which  seem  greater  than  the  mean- 
est woman's. 

This  is  a  radiant  morning.  Are  you 
thinking,  I  wonder,  of  what  you  prom- 
ised to  do  ?  You  said  the  time  for  your 
going  would  be  the  20th,  or  about.  I 
beg  you  not  to  make  it  impossible  to  do 
what  I  asked  and  you  promised.  Since 
it  must  be,  send  me  a  letter  saying  it  is 
over,  and  over  in  the  most  quiet,  secret 
and  speedy  way.  I  think  about  it  all  the 
time.  Oh,  I  beg  you  do  it  soon  as  you 
can,  and  as  carefully  as  you  can.  Do  not 
let  faith  in  human  nature — do  not  let  any 
faith  in  him — lead  you  farther  than  you 
have  to  go  to  ease  your  conscience. 

Go  through  it,  dear  soul,  and  write  to 
me  as  soon  as  possible  afterwards.  Will 

you  not  ?    I  shall  be  unhappy  if  the  21st 
[243] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

passes  and  I  have  not  heard  from  you. 
"What  penance,"  I  shall  say,  "have 
they  imposed  on  him?  A  monastery? 
Solitude?  Silence — with  no  word  to  or 
from  any  human  soul?"  You  could  not, 
dear  heart,  let  them  keep  you  from  send- 
ing one  message  at  least.  I  know  you 
would  not.  Rather  write  me  a  letter  to- 
morrow— a  little  one,  if  must  be — and 
tell  me  when  I  may  expect  the  other. 


[244] 


XXVI. 

Out  of  the  day  and  night 
A  joy  has  taken  flight : 

Fresh  spring  and  summer,  and  winter  hoar, 
Move  my  faint  heart  with  grief,  but  with  delight 

No  more — O  never  more ! 

SHELLEY. 

YOUR  letter — the  dear,  sweet,  human 
thing — came  in  good  time.  It  is  as  you 
say — "  if  I  were  there  to  help ! "  What  an 
example  of  happiness  and  devotion  we 
should  offer  to  those  people  about  you. 
In  this,  I  must  reiterate,  your  ecclesias- 
ticism  has  made  a  blunder  that  will  help 
powerfully,  sooner  or  later,  to  its  over- 
throw. Anything  at  war  with  human 
nature,  and  the  supremest  and  sweetest 
part  of  human  nature — that  in  which  God 
is,  if  God  is  anywhere  in  presence  on  this 
earth  of  ours — anything  at  war  with  that 

divine  unfolding  cannot  last.     It   must 
[245] 


A   WOMAN'S   HEART 

go  down  and  be  purged  and  cleansed.  If 
it  has  immortal  seeds  it  may  revive.  Oth- 
erwise, it  must  die.  The  coarse  and 
brutal  animalism  of  married  life  in  the 
old  time — when  the  wife  was  the  hus- 
band's chattel — and  the  priest's  concep- 
tion that  that  was  the  permanent  condi- 
tion of  marriage,  led  to  their  ruling  and 
the  church's  sin  against  itself.  You  see  I 
am  full  of  the  matter.  I  could  write  a 
book  upon  it.  It  might  be  a  polemic — 
called  "The  iniquity  of  the  forced  celi- 
bacy of  the  clergy." 

But  you  do  me  injustice,  dear,  when 
you  say  that  I  am  prejudiced  against  your 
organisation.  Think  of  all  that  has  hap- 
pened. With  the  knowledge  I  have 
gained,  could  I  think  otherwise?  Its 
power  over  you  is  hideous.  You  cannot 
think  like  a  free  man  because  of  its  train- 
ing, and  you  cannot  act  like  a  free  man. 
It  is,  as  I  have  said,  a  devil-fish  which 
sustains  itself  by  crushing  you  and  suck- 
ing your  life-blood — you  and  millions 

like  you. 

[246] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

During  the  days  to  come,  remember 
in  the  midst  of  all  your  posing  and  in- 
anity what  the  service  of  God  really  is— 
it  will  give  you  a  sense  and  strength  and 
sweetness  beyond  bodily  postures — that 
the  way  to  be  pure  and  good  is  to  be  pure 
and  good  in  the  midst  of  battle,  and  not 
off  doing  lip  service  to  an  anthropomor- 
phic God  a  little  smaller  in  mind  and 
morals  than  the  men  who  teach  "him," 
and  a  little  meaner  and  less  shrewd  than 
the  devil — of  which  his  priests  also  teach. 

I  am  thinking  of  you,  dear  heart. 
"Only  forty-eight  hours,"  I  said  to  my- 
self this  afternoon,  "since  he  was  here. 
Isn't  it  rather  forty-eight  days  ?  "  In  that 
way  I  must  perforce  count  time.  To- 
morrow I  shall  say  "Seventy-two  hours!" 
Next  Monday,  "Seven  days,  alas!" 
There  was  much  left  unsaid. 

When  you  go  to  that  place  be  lost  in 
the  multitude — look  different  from  usual, 
if  possible — disguise  your  voice,  appear- 
ance. After  you  have  spoken  that  mon- 
[247] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

strous  man  will  not  let  you  off  without  a 
look  to  find  who  you  are.  He  will  peep 
through  the  curtains  of  his  confessional 
at  you.  Choose  some  stupid  old  fellow, 
if  you  can.  Don't  say  there  are  not  such. 
I  have  seen  them.  Properly  treated  such 
will  be  least  likely  to  do  you  harm  here- 
after. Do  not  judge  any  one  of  them  by 
yourself.  You  believe  in  it,  and  the 
chances  are  that  he  will  not.  Remember 
Browning's  poem  of  the  Spanish  girl  who 
told  her  lover's  secret  to  her  confessor. 

You  have  a  peculiar  faith,  confidence, 
trustfulness  in  that  machinery  and  in 
human  nature.  Do  not  let  such  faith  be 
uppermost  during  your  hideous  errand. 
Guard  yourself.  And  if  he  asks  you 
your  name,  or  my  name !  I  cannot  think 
there  will  not  be  some  question  to  you 
whereby  he  may  later  trace  you.  Hold 
no  confidence. 

You  will  pardon  my  writing  this.  Your 
"confessing"  our  beautiful  love  and  ten- 
derness and  even  your  broken  vows  to  me 

is  in  every  way  so  hideous — so  hideous 
[248] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

that  I  cannot  begin  to  tell  how  revolted 
I  am,  how  humiliated  by  such  indignity. 
That  anything  I  have  ever  said  or  done 
should  be  brought  so  low! 

Tell  me  when  you  go  and  where.  A 
hundred  times  already  I  have  been  with 
you  in  mental  torture.  I  always  think 
of  the  cathedral  because  I  suppose  there 
the  priests  have  daily  sittings.  Write  to 
me  as  soon  as  it  is  over.  You  cannot  un- 
derstand the  tension  and  anxiety  that  con- 
sume me.  I  think  of  you  and  the  awful 
exposure  every  day  and  all  of  every  day. 

Then,  dear  love,  you  will  be  fallen  from 
me.  I  send  you  a  kiss  for  those  quivering 
lips,  and  an  embrace  for  that  warm, 
sweet  body  for  every  day  of  your  dear 
life.  These  you  shall  have  as  well  as 
your  "offices."  The  powers  about  you 
cannot  prevent  my  thinking  them  you- 
ward. 

"O  gentle  wind,  that  bloweth  south, 
From  where  my  Love  repaireth, 

Convey  a  kiss  frae  his  dear  mouth 
And  tell  me  how  he  fareth!" 
[249] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

Thank  you  for  the  letter.  It  came  in 
the  evening  light.  I  read  it  and  went  out 
into  the  woods — to  get  out  of  the  house- 
to  get  in  the  open  where  the  airs  move- 
to  find  the  silent  sympathy  of  the  trees 
and  sunset  sky. 

Our  poor  love!  It  has  been  so  over- 
poweringly  great  and  mysterious.  How 
I  have  worked  and  wrought  and  plead 
and  begged  and  prayed  for  it  in  my  poor 
way,  handicapped  by  your  fate  and  my 
own!  Sustaining  hope  was  in  my  heart 
— that  the  time  would  come  when  we 
should  live  for  each  other  and  with  each 
other.  That  would  have  eased  and 
wiped  away  all  sorrow  and  pain. 

No  one  was  ever  so  beautiful  and  dear 
to  me  as  you  were  then,  and  as  you  are 
now,  even  with  all  this  horror  upon  me— 
no  one  with  whom  I  could  be  so  happy 
and  so  heartily  myself.  Without  you  I 
shall  never  be  able  to  do  my  life  work. 

And  you,  beloved,  with  you  sweet,  sym- 
pathetic nature — I  take  you  to  my  heart 

and  press  you  close  with  such  yearnings 
[250] 


A    WOMAN'S    HEART 

as  a  mother  presses  the  child  she  must 
trust  to  strangers.  There  is  an  awful 
tragedy  in  your  choice.  My  hope  for 
you  has  always  been  that  you  would 
realise  how  much  larger  you  are  than 
your  creed,  or  the  power  you  endeavour 
to  propitiate.  But  you  have  not,  and  you 
and  I  are  apart.  The  fatal  enslavement 
in  your  youth  makes  later  freedom  im- 
possible. I  think  of  your  life — all  the 
long  years  of  it — and  the  little  cares  and 
vexations  of  which  you  spoke  when  you 
last  were  here,  and  I  am  troubled.  I  can- 
not think  of  your  becoming  unserene. 

This  is  one  of  your  holy  days — I 
thought  as  I  awoke  at  dawn  this  morn- 
ing— the  day  of  the  pia  sententia  that  the 
body  of  Mary,  mother  of  Jesus,  was 
taken  to  heaven— " up"  they  said  in 
their  poor  ignorance  of  nature,  but  now- 
adays, when  there  is  no  "up,"  their 
superstitions  still  survive.  The  tale  be- 
longs to  the  time  when  there  was  an  "up 
to  heaven"  which  was  a  gold-paved  city 

in  the  skies.     You  are  my  pia  sententia 
[251] 


A   WOMAN'S    HEART 

of  to-day  and  my  approaching  holy  week 
—the  anniversary  of  the  time  I  met  you. 

You  said  you  would  see  me  once  more 
and  formally.  When  you  do  come  will 
you  not  send  a  note  of  announcement? 
I  should  be  troubled  were  I  not  able  to 
see  you. 

May  God  hold  us  in  Everlasting  Arms. 
The  end  of  this  world  for  me  is  not  far 
away. 


FINIS. 


[The  brave  and  loving  spirit  of  Katharine 
Peshconet  departed  this  life  in  October,  1904. 
Her  sturdy  baby  died  suddenly  the  following 
morning — it  would  seem  as  if  appalled  at  his 
desolate  lot — and  the  bodies  of  mother  and  child, 
clasping  each  other  in  lasting  embrace,  were  laid 
to  rest  together.  Doing  "  penance  "  in  a  distant 
monastery,  the  husband  did  not  see  his  wife  after 
the  interview  referred  to  in  the  paragraph  above. 
His  son  he  never  saw.] 

[252] 


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